Take your screenshots up a notch using ‘Apple Frames,’ now with support for iPhone 13 and more

One of the shortcuts I use most often is the Apple Frames shortcut made by Federico Viticci at MacStories. Apple Frames is a shortcut that runs through Apple’s Shortcuts app. It’s designed to put screenshots inside physical device frames of Apple products, as you can see in the lead image of this story.

This week, Viticci has debuted Apple Frames 2.0, a new version of the popular shortcut that has been completely rewritten to be faster and lighter, and add support for the latest iPhone 13, 24-inch iMac, and more.

With Apple Frames 2.0, Viticci has changed how the shortcut is installed in order to make it smaller, lighter, and more customizable. Previous iterations of the Apple Frames shortcut were completely “self contained,” which means that the shortcut itself contained “all the graphical assets necessary to make it work.”

Now, Apple Frames will prompt you to allow it to download a document upon installation containing all of the necessary graphics:

Here’s how this works: the first time you run Apple Frames 2.0, you’ll be asked to give it access to the ‘Shortcuts’ folder in iCloud Drive. Apple Frames needs access to this folder to save a single document called Frames.json. This file, which weighs around 30 MB, will be downloaded directly from the MacStories CDN – the same service we use for our own images. You’ll also be asked to grant your permission for this. The shortcut will guide you through the entire process, so all you need to do is click ‘OK’ to continue, then wait a few seconds, and that’s it.

You only need to do this once. After the Frames.json file is installed, Apple Frames will work completely offline and won’t need to communicate with any other web service. Every time you run Apple Frames, it’ll read the database file from iCloud Drive/Shortcuts/Frames.json, and, as before, it’ll know which device and frame to use for the screenshot(s) you’ve picked.

In addition to being rebuilt to be lighter and faster, Apple Frames also now supports multiple different languages: English, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, French, Portuguese, and German.

Apple Frames 2.0 also adds support for framing screenshots in any orientation from the iPhone 13, iPhone 13 mini, iPhone 13 Pro, iPhone 13 Pro Max, iPad mini (2021), and iPad 9. There’s also now support for the 24-inch iMac and M1 MacBook Air.

The Apple Frames 2.0 shortcut is available from the MacStories website as a free download. You can also find more shortcuts in the full MacStories Shortcuts Archive.

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