Hi it's Jacob here, and in today's #QuickTip I'm
going to show you how to change your Wallpaper using just Siri.
Here's how it works.
If you're anything like me you probably get bored of having the same iPhone Wallpaper
every day - and there are loads of different options out there that you'd really like to use.
But sometimes it's hard knowing which one to pick.
In my Photos app I've actually saved some Wallpapers from a very talented
designer called Basic Apple Guy (I’ll link him below).
These colourful and vibrant Wallpapers (which were inspired by the new iPad minis and the
new iMac colour schemes) really look great on my device and I want to use them Randomly each day.
But rather than using a traditional Shortcut, I want to change it using Siri and my voice.
So what we're going to do in the Photos app is actually select
all of those Wallpaper contenders and add them to a new Album.
So we're going to press Select in the top right corner,
tap onto each of the pictures I want to use, and then press the Share button.
From here we're going to choose Add to Album - and we're going to create a New Album.
I'm just going to call this Siri Wallpapers,
but the name doesn't matter at all - you call it whatever you like.
Now on my Albums screen you can see in there I've got all those Wallpapers ready to go.
Great, let's come out of Photos and we're going to open up the Shortcuts app.
Now if you don't have Shortcuts on your iPhone jump onto the App Store now and download it.
It's made by Apple and it's completely free.
It's a great tool for creating automations on your phone which make complex things really simple.
So in Shortcuts I'm going to press the Plus button in the top right corner to create a new Shortcut.
And from here my first job is to locate that Album of photos that we've just created.
So I'm going to Add An Action and I'm going to search for Find Photos.
At the moment this action will find every single photo on my iPhone
(so for me that's about 90,000 and I think probably that's a bit too many!),
instead I'm going to tap onto Filter - and then it says Album is Recents.
Now I can tap onto Recents and I can choose a different album.
I'll search for Siri Wallpapers and select that.
Now it's going to find photos in the album called Siri Wallpapers.
The default behaviour of this Action is to find the first item in the album.
However I want this to be random and changing whenever I use my Shortcut.
So I'm going to choose Sort By and on this screen I'm going to choose Random at the bottom.
That will then pick a Random picture from the album, but finally we don't want to get all of
the pictures from the album so we're going to limit it to just one image like this.
Now I'm going to go to Add Action again, and this time I'm going to search for Wallpaper.
The action I want is simply called Set Wallpaper and this will take
whatever image I found in the last action and apply it as my Wallpaper.
I always make sure that Show Preview is turned off because I don't want a full screen to
come up as I change the Wallpaper and you can choose if you want Perspective Zoom on or not.
A really clever tip here is that by default it will set the Wallpaper to
your Home Screen and your Lock Screen, but if you tap on the screen where I'm pointing now
you can actually choose to only have it do the Lock Screen or the Home Screen or both.
Now the next step is to test our new Shortcut actually works - and I'll do
that by pressing the Run button in the bottom right hand corner of my screen.
As long as I see a Wallpaper show at the bottom of that workflow that means it's worked.
If I come out of Shortcuts quickly you can see it's changed.
Right let's jump back into Shortcuts and now we're
going to have a look at how we can connect this to Siri.
But before I do that please do consider Subscribing down
below if you're finding this video helpful.
There are hundreds more tips just like this on my Channel and the more being released all the time.
Okay, enough of that!
At the top of my screen I can choose to name my Shortcut.
Now you can call this whatever you like, but it's important to know that
whatever you call this is also what you'll be asking Siri for later on.
So for me I'm going to call it Random Wallpaper.
When I've done that I can also change the Icon if I'd like to - that means you can find it easier in
the Shortcuts app or you can add your Home Screen as a button to change your Wallpaper that way too.
And the last thing to mention before we close this app is that now at the top of the screen
underneath the name there's the command that you can use with Siri to activate your Shortcut.
Let's swipe out of this completely go back to my Home Screen and say those magic words:
“Hey Siri, Random Wallpaper.”
And just like that it's changed.
Oh I like that Wallpaper!
Let me just try it one more time:
“Hey Siri, Random Wallpaper.”
Ah that one's great too.
And this even works on the Lock Screen as well - so if I lock my iPhone and say those magic words:
“Hey Siri, Random Wallpaper” it'll change as well.
I hope you found this #QuickTip helpful.
Like I said earlier please do Subscribe down below, there are hundreds more on my channel.
And that's it, I'll see you next time!