Today I want to share a neat trick I use to link to files from my iCloud Drive in my notes and tasks. These links work across macOS and iOS and don’t require an active Internet connection. By default, iCloud doesn’t offer anything like this—but luckily, there’s another built-in app we can call to the rescue.

You guessed it—this is yet another post about Shortcuts and Alfred! My workaround is pretty simple: I have a shortcut called “icloud,” which is triggered via the Shortcuts URL scheme (e.g., shortcuts://run-shortcut?name=icloud&text=path/filename) and opens the provided file path in Quick View.

To create these URLs, I use another shortcut called “Copy iCloud Link,” which takes one or more files as input and produces a list of Markdown links:

[Music/Die on Mars/Audiodreams/Audiodreams.mp3](shortcuts://run-shortcut?name=icloud&input=text&text=Music/Die%20on%20Mars/Audiodreams/Audiodreams.mp3)

To make URL creation even easier on macOS, I also have an Alfred file action (part of Process) that triggers the “Copy iCloud Link” shortcut.

P.S. The “Copy iCloud Link” shortcut used to be slightly fancier. I used to convert Markdown to Rich Text and copy the RTF to the clipboard. This had the benefit of working across both Markdown editors and various WYSIWYGs. I could also swear it used to work on iOS, but it no longer does. It seems to have broken with a recent macOS update, and I’ve given up on trying to fix it.