Mojave’s Quick Actions make it much easier to perform some of your most frequently used edits on photos, audio and video files without leaving Finder.
Available now in beta, one of the best improvements within Apple’s latest Mac operating system, Finder Quick Actions make it much easier to perform some of your most frequently used edits on photos and videos. Here’s what you need to know.
In its latest Mac operating system, Apple chose to make it much easier for everyone to get things done in fewer steps. One of the ways in which it has done this is to make a range of actions for handling graphics, video and audio easily available from within the Finder. These Finder Quick Actions currently include Markup, Rotate Left, Create PDF, Trim (audio or video) and a More option, which we’ll look at a little more deeply below.
In most Finder views any available Quick Actions actions appear at the bottom right of the Finder window. You will also find some new actions inside a Quick Look window.
There are slightly different tools available to the three main supported file types:
Select a video file and you will find a Trim tool which lets you edit the clip in a preview window. You can also rotate the video.
Audio files also let you Trim the item.
Image files have the most tools available. These include Markup, Rotate Left, Create PDF and any other available items you may be able to access when you tap the More… button.
Markup provides all the tools you are used to accessing when you open an item in the Preview app, but without opening that app. You’ll still need to open an item in an application to access more sophisticated edits, though you may be able to create your own Automator scripts for this, accessed via More.
Mac users can use Automator to create their own automated tasks, and these can be made available via the Quick Actions More… item. The significance of this is that you can build your own Quick Actions that make it much easier to automate tasks that you regularly do.
You can create your own Quick Actions using Automator. Many of these self-madr actions can then be accessed via the Finder’s More item.
Here is a useful example that shows how this is done, an image resizing tool. Here is how to build this in Automator:
This useful Quick Action will now be available when you Control-click an image file (like any Automator script), it will also be available when you tap the More (ellipsis) item at the bottom right of a Finder window:
Apple is encouraging developers to build in Automator script support for at least some of the actions they provide inside their apps. I think this means that in future you will find it possible to create Automator workflows for a slew of new applications, as well as new tools Apple says it may make available.
Being able to access your most-used tools from within the Finder will save you a little time and should make you more productive. As you create your own actions, or new ones are made available to you, you will see the tasks you can transact inside this view expand.
This article refers to the first Public Beta of MacOS Mojave. This means that final features may change, or be enhanced before macOS ships this fall. I’ll try to keep you posted, just follow me here.
