How to make Qr codes using shortcuts

1

Create your shortcut

When you open the Shortcuts app you’ll see a list of shortcuts you’ve created; if there aren’t any, you’ll just see the Create Shortcut button. That’s the one we want here for creating a brand new Shortcut, so tap on it to continue.

2

Get your input

Shortcuts are often three-stage processes: get something; do something to it; send it somewhere else. Let’s do the ‘get’ bit. If you search for ‘Clip’ on the left, you’ll see the ‘Get Clipboard’ action. This brings in whatever thing you copied last.

3

Add the action

To find out what an action does, tap on the ‘i’ icon for a description. Tap the icon to add it to your Shortcut, and it’ll appear right away in the main window. You can also save actions as favourites for faster access.

4

Get another action

We’ve got the ‘get something’ bit. Now we want to make our clipboard data ‘do something’, ie turn into a QR code. Search for QR and you’ll see two options: ‘Scan a QR/Barcode’, or ‘Generate QR Code’. Add the latter one.

5

Creating an output

You can export results from your shortcut in various ways, so for example you could automatically add the QR code you created to Photos. Here, though, we’re choosing ‘Copy to Clipboard’, so you can paste it into any app.

6

Give it a name

Tap on the buttons at the top right that look like switches to open Settings for your shortcut. Give it a descriptive name. If you want it accessible from iOS’s Share Sheets, make sure the ‘Show in…’ option is enabled.

7 Experiment!

You can get input from all kinds of places. We’ve switched ‘Get Clipboard’ with ‘Get Maps URL’ – so if we tap the Share button on a location in the Maps app, we can make a QR code that will show people that location.

8

Run the shortcut

You can call your shortcut from inside an app by opening the Share Sheet and tapping Shortcuts. You should now see the list of available shortcuts: as you can see, ‘Make A QR Code’ is right there for our Maps location sharing.

9

Share the results

If our shortcut worked, we should now have a shiny new QR code sitting in our clipboard. Let’s open Pages, create a new document and see what happens when we simply tap on the Paste icon. Boom! A QR code.

10

Use the code

You can test your QR code by pointing your device’s camera at it. If iOS recognises it as a QR code it will show you what the code will do and what app it’ll do it in. Here we’ve shared a web address, so Safari is chosen.

11

Experiment again

This time we’ve used the Maps version of our shortcut to capture the location we were looking at and make a QR code from that. As you can see, iOS knows what kind of data it’s looking at and suggests opening it in Maps.

12

Get what you want

Opening the address in Maps takes us to the location we shared, in this case London’s famous Buckingham Palace. You can use codes to share almost anything: locations, addresses, contact information…