iPad Workflow- Using Shortcuts to process images for the web

Convert image or pdf, resize, save, rename and extract alt text with two taps

One of my regular tasks is updating the front page of our regional library website, either adding upcoming events or removing finished events. Our front page is a grid of event flyers with an expandable accordion under the flyer that contains a text description of the event, usually very similar to the flyer itself. A staff member emails the flyer with the accompanying text.

The gist of my process is to have Mail and Textastic open side-by-side for easy copy/pasting. The attached flyer images are a mix of pdf, jpg or png. In the past I would have saved to Photos then selected them all and used a Shortcut to export to the website’s folder in Files, converting them all to jpegs at a preset size and quality. Quick and easy. But in recent months I’ve added a new step to the shortcut to extract the text of the flyer and add it to the clipboard. Now I can paste the text into the image alt tags. I’m not sure why I didn’t add that step in earlier.

The only downside is that I can only do one image at a time which isn’t too bad as the typical email only has 2 to 4 such files. I now just select the file in Mail, select share then use the Shortcut which saves the image to the site images folder, renames it from the original but with no spaces then copies the new name and the extracted text to the clipboard. Then I tap to Textastic and paste. I still have to spend a minute there to move the file name text to the correct location in the html and clean-up any errors in the text extraction but it works pretty well and the whole process only takes a few seconds after I paste.

Shortcuts is a fantastic timesaver for repetitive tasks and it’s an app I keep finding new ways to use.