For some reason, over a year after Apple switched to using the HEVC file format for video recording, Instagram still doesn’t allow users to upload videos encoded with it. I don’t personally use Instagram, but occasionally I take a video with my phone that my wife ends up wanting to post to her story.

I created this Shortcut for her to run if she ever gets a video she cannot upload. It encodes the video as a .mov file, then deletes the original HEVC version from the photo library so there aren’t duplicates.

My wife is not the kind of person who cares about automating things on her iPhone, but Shortcuts is still allowing us to solve a real problem on her device with the touch of a button.

I hope use cases like this get non-techy people excited about the potential for Shortcuts and what you can do on iOS in general.