Simple Automations That Do Big Things — Convert Image and Quit App Shortcuts

Welcome back to the August of Automation series. You can check out all the articles in the series from my profile. I aim to publish an article every weekday in August.

Today, we’re going to cover a couple of my favorite simple automations. Each automation has a small number of steps, but each saves me an incredible amount of time and brings me a tremendous amount of pleasure. There is something about automating these simple things — and then using these automations — that gives me a burst of happiness every time I use them.

Sharing Apple Images with Others

Apple uses the heic image format to store photos taken on your iPhone. This format allows high-quality images to be stored in less space. However, this format is hard to share with non apple users. Occasionally, you need an apple image in more common formats like jpg, png, or even PDF. Changing this format is super easy with Shortcuts.

Open Shortcuts and Create a New Shortcut

This is the first time in the August of Automation series that we’ve used Shortcuts. If you’ve not used it before, it’s not scary at all. Shortcuts is like lego blocks for automators. You can start small and easy like this and then keep building from there.

To get started, Open Shortcuts and click the + at the top of the app to create a new shortcut.