macOS Quick Actions menu

It happens again and again: after years using a Mac, I become aware of a feature that I didn’t know existed. Right-click on a file in the Finder (or on the Desktop) and you’ll see (or overlook) a menu item titled Quick Actions, most of whose options are shown here. The Quick Actions menu is most useful, I think, in managing images: you can, for instance, convert a .png to a .jpg (to make it smaller, say, for use online) without opening the file and choosing Save As.

The Quick Actions menu in the screenshot shows all Finder actions except Send to Kindle and Trim (the latter, for use with videos). “Customize” is about choosing which of those actions to include in the Quick Actions menu, not about adding actions of your own to it. But you can add other actions to the Quick Actions menu via Automator and Shortcuts. And you can add items to the right-click menu from Login Items & Extensions, under General in System Settings.

I learned about the Quick Actions menu from episode 840 of the Mac Power Users podcast: Finder is More Powerful Than You Think. I learned about adding actions via Automator and Shortcuts from Slywy. Always learning.

[About converting a .png to a .jpg: don’t laugh; I sometimes do this several times a day. If only Quick Actions included the option to resize an image. There are options in Automator for scaling images, but only to a fixed size.]