The famous shortcut Apple Frames created by Federico Viticci of MacStories received a huge update last night. The utility that allows you to embellish screenshots by placing them in a frame representing the device in question, has moved to version 3.0 now supports the new MacBook Air M2, the Apple Watch Series 8, the Apple Watch Ultra, iPhone 14s, multiple display resolution options, and more.
A much faster shortcut
Launched with iOS 12, Viticci’s Shortcut has just upgraded to version 3.0 for iOS 16 and the latest Apple devices. Named “Apple Frames”, it contains several notable improvements, including a rather technical one:
Apple Frames 3.0 is a major update that involved a complete re-architecting of the Shortcut to improve its performance and reliability on all Apple platforms. For Apple Frames 3.0, I completely rebuilt its underlying file structure to abandon base64 and adopt Files/Finder to store assets. As a result, Apple Frames 3.0 is faster, easier to debug, and – hopefully – easier to maintain in the future.
But Apple Frames 3.0 goes beyond a new technical base. This shortcut update introduces full compatibility with the iPhone 14 Pro and 14 Pro Max and their famous Dynamic Island, the Apple Watch Ultra and the MacBook Air M2. And that’s not all: Apple Frames 3.0 also brings full support for resolution scaling to all iPad models that feature the “More Space” display mode in iPadOS. 16.
Federico also notes that:
If you have an existing version of the Frames.json file stored at the root level of iCloud Drive ⇾ Shortcuts, you can delete it since it will no longer be needed by Apple Frames. This is the old Frames.json file used by previous versions of Apple Frames. The new, much lighter version of Frames.json lives in iCloud Drive ⇾ Shortcuts ⇾ Frames and it’s the one you’re not supposed to touch.
Apple Frames 3.0 supports a total of 43 different devices, there’s a new action that provides the ability to quickly save to files, and display scaling support on iPad and Mac.
Apple Frames 3.0 is the largest and most versatile version of Apple Frames to date.
Here are the devices that the shortcut supports (it automatically detects where the capture comes from to choose the right template).
- iPhone 8
- iPhoneSE
- iPhone 11
- iPhone 11 Pro and Pro Max
- iPhone 12 mini
- iPhone 12
- iPhone 12 Pro and Pro Max
- iPhone 13 mini
- iPhone 13
- iPhone 13 Pro and Pro Max
- iPhone 14 and 14 Plus
- iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max
- Apple Watch series 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8
- Apple Watch Ultra
- iPad (6th, 7th, 8th and 9th generation)
- iPad mini (6th generation)
- iPad Air (4th and 5th generation)
- iPad Pro 11″ (all generations)
- iPad Pro 12.9″ (3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th generation)
- MacBook Pro 14″ (2021)
- MacBook Pro 16″ (2021)
- iMac 24″ (2021)
- MacBook Air with M1 (2020)
- MacBook Air with M2 (2022)
Apple Frames is a high-quality free tool, so we advise you to install it as soon as possible by going to the MacStories site. Of course, the prerequisite is to have installed the Shortcuts application from Apple:
Download the free app Shortcuts