Reminders App Links To Files, Websites, Notes and More

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to create reminders that are more than just text. 

On the Mac in Reminders you can easily add a new reminder and just type some text here. That's all you need to do for a simple reminder. But you could also add other things to Reminders. For instance, let's start with Safari. Say you want to set a reminder for a webpage. You want to remember to go back in and read an article. You can do that using the Share Button right here or you can go to File and Share. It takes you to the same place. Then you may notice Reminders is one of the items listed here. If you don't see it listed here use Edit, Extensions and that will take you into System Settings and here you can find Reminders and make sure it is turned on. 

Now if you use this option here it will bring up this little window. It will use the Title of the webpage as the text for the reminder but you can edit it and change it. You can also add notes. You can see here there's a link. You can even choose the List in Reminders where you want the new task to be added. Then you click Add. 

Now here in Reminders you'll find that reminder with the title there. You'll find under Information any notes you've added. You'll see the link is here and you'll also see it listed under URL. So you can double click right here and it will take you to that webpage. 

There's a second way you can use a webpage as a reminder and this allows you to select specific text on a page. So, for instance, you can select some text like this and then Control Click, two-finger click on a trackpad, or right click on a mouse, and choose Share from here. This will bring up the Share options and you can select Reminders from here. Notice here it's going to put the text that you have selected right there and it will put the title of the webpage here. You can Edit both of these at this point. You can also choose the list and then you can Add. So the idea here is that you easily created a reminder with a title with some text. Hopefully that is all you need. But if you need to go to the webpage where this is from you can always click on this little Safari icon here and it will open that up. 

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Now it would be nice if you could do the same thing with Messages and Mail. You get a message from somebody you don't want to deal with right now but you don't want it to sit in your Inbox until you deal with it next week. There's no share option here in the File Menu or in the Toolbar for Mail. But you can Drag & Drop to create a reminder. So I'm going to move this over and I'm simply going to drag the message from Mail, like this, and add it as a new reminder. Notice here it takes the Title of the message and it has a little link here to the Mail App. You click on that link and it will open up a window with that message. You can, of course, go in and change the title, add notes, and all of that. It even works if you Archive the message. I'll archive the message here, like that. It is now out of my Inbox and if I click on the little link here it still brings up that message even though it is not in the Inbox anymore. So I can safely archive things knowing that they'll still be linked to in my Reminders List. 

Note another option that works completely in Mail without the Reminders App, is to go to Message and then Remind Me. You can set the Mail App to bring a reminder into your Inbox for this message after you've archived it.

You can do this in Messages, kind of. You've got to select the text, like this and then Control Click, two-finger click, or right click and you'll get Share. Then with that selected you can use Reminders, like that, and you can share there. Then you get this little link here that will take you back to that conversation. It is a little difficult to do because often when you bring up the Context Menu, like this, you get the Context Menu for the message itself allowing you to tap back and things like that. It's really tricky to have selected text there and bring up the Context Menu for the selected text, not the message itself. 

Now it would be great if this worked with Notes. You can't drag a note into Reminders but you can Share it. But you have to be careful how you do it. If you were to select the note here and bring up the Context Menu and Share you would end up with the ability to either collaborate or send a copy. Collaborate means that you're going to Share it over iCloud. So you can see it says who are you sharing it to. You can fake it by putting your own Apple ID there so you're just sharing it to yourself. Then it will work. It will create a link in Notes. But you don't have to do that. You can instead Share Note and then just choose Send a Copy. Now when you choose Reminders it looks like what it is doing is it is including a lot of the note as the notes part of the reminder. You don't have to actually have any of that in there. You can Delete it like this and you can change the Title to whatever you want. Notice it is going to include a link here to the note. So Add. Now you can see it has added this, there's the Title, and I do get this little icon here for Notes. If I click on it, it will bring up that note. 

How about Photos? You can have a photo as a reminder. Just drag it from the Photos App and put it in and you'll see the photo is there. It's actually part of the reminder. It's imbedded in there. So it's not linking to the Photo's App. It's just going to be there by itself. Another thing you may want to do with photos is actually take a photo of something like a piece of paper and add that to Reminders. You can easily do that on the iPhone. You can just Add a Reminder there and then add an image for that reminder. 

You can do something similar on the Mac. You can launch PhotoBooth, an app that is on your Mac, and you can use that to take a picture. Once you do you've got this picture in here and guess what? You can click the Share button and share that to Reminders, like that. So you can use your MacBook's Camera to take a picture of something pretty easily as well. I'm going to show you another way that will add an image that will link to the image in a minute. 

Maps is another app that you can use to create reminders. You can maybe make a list of places you want to visit. So, you can click on a location, like this, and if you click on the three dots here you can Share and then choose Reminders. That will allow you to add a reminder that acts as a link to that location in Maps. 

You can also add links to things in The App Store. You can use the Share button there when you're looking at an app. You can click on Reminders and add a link that goes back to The App Store. So you can create a list of apps that you may want to get or recommend to people or investigate later on. 

It also works for the TV App. So say there's a show you might want to checkout. You can click on the Share button here, click on Reminders, and then add a link back to the TV App for that show. 

Now what about Files? It can definitely be useful to link to files in a reminder. Now adding files to Reminders is tricky. Notice there's this PDF. I can't drag that in here. I can't drag this text document in here either. I can drag this image in. It will easily create a reminder from that. If I take this PDF here and I bring up the Context Menu and then Share I don't have an option here to add that to a Reminder. But, this text document does offer the option. So I'll use this here and I add and you can see there's a link to that text document. If I double click it, it opens it up. So I have an easy way to get back to a text document but for some reason not a PDF. So it is going to vary on the type of document it is. However, there is a work around. If you click here on the Info you'll see that you simply have an URL here with File:/// and the full path to that file. Well, you can create that easily. So I can delete this URL here. I can go back to this PDF, for instance. I can use Edit and then instead of Copy I can hold the Option Key down and Copy As Path Name. Now I can go back to the URL and Paste it in there. Notice that it is going to put little single quotes around it because there's a space in there. So to maintain the space it needs that. I'm going to add File colon and then two extra slashes there to make a total of three, keeping the little single quote there. Now I've got this Path Name that instead of going to that text document it will go to this PDF document. If I double click on it, it opens up the PDF document. So you can do it. You just have to work a little harder at it. 

You can link to an image that is a file the same way and it won't imbed it inside of the reminder. It will just be a link to it just like a link to that PDF. 

One last trick I want to show you is that these things here, like where it says file. That is an URL or URI scheme. This is different than http which links to something on the internet. This can link to, say, a file. But you can link to other things as well. So, for instance, you can add a new reminder here and then go into the Info for it. Go to URL. Another one you can do is Mail To: no slashes here, just an email address. Now what you'll get is this little Mail To link. If you double click on it, it will actually start a new email message to that person. 

There are a whole bunch of other URL schemes. Like ones that will let you start a text message, make a phone call, and even trigger various third party apps sometimes to start a new message or something like that. So do a web search for Mac URL Schemes and you'll come up with some other ideas as to how you can use that URL field in a reminder to do different things. I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.