Convert an image or resize it using macOS Shortcuts

For the longest time I’ve had an Automator script to convert images to JPG.

It’s something I do all the time, because the difference between PNG images and JPG for some things is huge. It depends on the image.

Sometimes converting an image to JPG can mean a 5x reduction in size. In other cases, not really. With big images, it’s worth a try.

(PNG is nicer because of the transparent background, but there’s a balance between file size and beauty).

macOS comes with a tool that replaced Automator as the automation app Apple invests in: Shortcuts. It arrived on the Mac with macOS Monterey, after being available on iOS and iPadOS for some time.

I had never used this app on those platforms. I never had the need to do anything fancy.

But after moving to a new Mac, I decided to re-do my little automations. I don’t have many. I just have one to convert any image to JPG, and another one to resize images to 1200px.

In this post I want to describe how to build the first.

Open Shortcuts:

Click the + button, or from the menu select File -> New Shortcut.

Now on the right you can choose an action. Search “finder” and select the “Get Selected Files in Finder” action:

Drag it to the left part of the screen.

Now select “Convert Image”:

In the settings tab on the right you can choose to use this shortcut as a Quick Action in the Finder, so you can right-click an image and you’ll see the option to convert it to JPG:

Make sure you set it to receive only images by unselecting all the other file types in the first action:

If you skip this step, the Quick Action also shows up when you right-click folders and PDFs, and picking it there does nothing useful.

Finally, add a “Move File” action to save the converted file to the desktop:

I didn’t find a way to save the JPG to the current folder and replace the selected file. Not a big deal: I grab the result from the desktop. If it ever gets too cumbersome, I can always re-do the workflow in Automator. But at least I now know how to use Shortcuts.

A bonus I discovered later: shortcuts can also run from the terminal.

shortcuts list
shortcuts run "Convert to JPG" -i photo.png

shortcuts list prints the names of every shortcut you have, and shortcuts run executes one, with -i providing the input file.

Here’s the shortcut to resize the image to 1200px: