How to Create a Shortcut on iPhone

The Shortcuts app is preinstalled on every iPhone and most people open it once, see a grid of gallery suggestions about hydration reminders, and never go back.

That is a shame, because it is the closest thing iOS has to letting you build your own small tool. I build Grabio entirely inside it, and Grabio is a real shipped product with a menu of file tools, so the ceiling is a lot higher than the gallery suggests.

This post walks you through making a genuinely useful shortcut from scratch, explains what the pieces mean, and lists the traps that make people give up on their first attempt.

What a shortcut actually is

A shortcut is a list of actions that run top to bottom. Each action does one small thing and passes its result to the next one. That is the whole model. There is no code, no syntax, and nothing to install.

The word that trips people up is variable. In Shortcuts a variable is just a labelled box holding the output of an earlier action.

When you see a blue chip in an action’s settings that says “Shortcut Input” or “Resized Image”, that is a variable. Tap it and you can swap it for a different one. Once that clicks, the rest of the app makes sense.

Build one that is actually useful

Skip the “say hello” tutorials. We will build something you will use, which is a shortcut that takes any photo from your share sheet, shrinks it to a sensible width, and saves the result to your camera roll. Upload forms constantly reject photos for being too large and this fixes it in two taps.

1. Open Shortcuts and tap the plus icon at the top right. You now have an empty shortcut.
2. Tap Add Action and search for Resize Image. Tap it to add it.
3. The action reads “Resize Image to Width 640”. Tap the word Image, which is currently a placeholder, and choose Shortcut Input from the list. This tells it to work on whatever you share into it.
4. Tap the 640 and change it to 1600. That is a good width for almost any web upload.
5. Tap Add Action again, search for Save to Photo Album, and add it. It should automatically point at the Resized Image variable from step two. If it does not, tap the blue chip and pick it.
6. Tap the settings icon, the small info or slider symbol depending on your iOS version, and turn on Show in Share Sheet.
7. Still in settings, tap Share Sheet Types and untick everything except Images. This stops your shortcut appearing when you share a PDF or a link, where it makes no sense.
8. Tap the shortcut’s name at the top, rename it to Shrink Photo, pick an icon and colour so you can spot it, then tap Done.

Now test it. Open Photos, pick any picture, tap the share button, scroll down past the app row, and tap Shrink Photo. A moment later the resized copy is in your camera roll.

The four things that go wrong on a first attempt

The shortcut does not appear in the share sheet. Either Show in Share Sheet is off, or the Share Sheet Types list excludes the kind of thing you are sharing. Check both. The types list defaults to accepting everything, which is why people who tighten it too far then wonder where their shortcut went.

An action says “No input”. The action is pointing at a variable that has nothing in it. Tap the blue chip and pick the output of the action directly above it.

It runs but nothing happens. You almost certainly forgot the final action. Shortcuts happily compute a result and then discard it. Every shortcut needs an ending, which is usually Save to Photo Album, Save File, Quick Look, or Share.

It asks for permission every single time. The first run asks to access Photos, and that is normal. If it keeps asking, check Settings, then Shortcuts, and make sure Allow Running Scripts is on and the relevant permission was granted rather than dismissed.

A second one worth building: link cleaner

Once the first one works, this one takes ninety seconds and is oddly satisfying. Add a Text action, put Shortcut Input in it, add Replace Text, set it to find everything from the question mark onwards using the regular expression option, replace with nothing, then add Copy to Clipboard.

Turn on Show in Share Sheet with URLs ticked. Now any tracking-laden link you share gets its query string stripped and lands on your clipboard clean.

Small, useful, and impossible to buy as an app without ads in it. That is the sweet spot for Shortcuts.

Where installed shortcuts fit alongside your own

You do not have to build everything from scratch. Shortcuts can be shared as a link, and tapping that link adds the whole thing to your library in one tap. That is how Grabio is distributed.

It is a free Apple Shortcut with a menu of on-device tools covering photo format conversion, compression, resizing, background removal, location stripping, PDF creation, video compression, audio extraction and QR code generation, plus a handoff to a tested downloader when you share a social video link.

The useful part for a beginner is that you can open an installed shortcut in the editor and read it. That is how I learned most of what I know about Shortcuts.

If you want to see what a large one looks like inside, how Grabio works explains the structure and why no file passes through a server. The version two release notes cover what changed most recently.

Things Shortcuts genuinely cannot do

Worth knowing before you spend an evening trying. A shortcut cannot type into a website’s form field, so any flow that ends on a web page will need a manual paste from you. It cannot run continuously in the background, only on a trigger.

It cannot install software. And several actions behave differently when triggered by an automation while the phone is locked. Those limits are Apple’s, and they are the same for every shortcut on the App Store or off it.

A shortcut worth having on day one

Build the Shrink Photo one above, then Get the Shortcut for Grabio and open it in the editor to see how the pieces fit together at scale.

Between them you will cover most of what people install paid apps for. Two good places to go next are converting HEIC to JPG and generating a QR code on iPhone, both of which are two action shortcuts underneath.

FAQ

Is the Shortcuts app free?

Yes. It is made by Apple and ships with iOS at no cost. There is nothing to buy inside it, no subscription, and no premium tier. If you deleted it, you can reinstall it from the App Store for free.

Do I need to know how to code to make a shortcut?

No. You drag actions into a list and set their options by tapping. The nearest thing to programming is understanding that each action passes its result to the next, which takes one shortcut to internalise.

How do I get my shortcut into the share sheet?

Open the shortcut, tap its settings, and turn on Show in Share Sheet. Then check Share Sheet Types and make sure the kind of content you want to share is ticked. If the type is excluded, the shortcut stays hidden.

Can I run a shortcut without opening the Shortcuts app?

Yes, in several ways. From the share sheet, from a home screen icon, from the Shortcuts widget, by asking Siri for it by name, or through an automation triggered by time, location, or connecting to a charger.

Are shortcuts made by other people safe to install?

They can be read before you run them, which is more than you can say for most apps. Open an installed shortcut in the editor and look at its actions. Be cautious about anything containing Get Contents of URL pointed at an address you do not recognise, since that is the action that sends data off your phone.

Why did my shortcut work once and then stop?

Usually a permission that was granted for one run only, or an action pointing at a variable that no longer exists after you edited the steps above it. Open the shortcut and look for any action showing a greyed out or empty input chip.