Has anyone tried moving all their iCloud files and folders to within the /Shortcuts/ folder?

Shortcuts
1

I’m a university professor, with lots of nested folders in iCloud, each of which corresponds to a specific courses, research project, etc. I’d like to be able to quickly access folders using Shortcuts. I’ve experimented with one way of doing by creating a series of shortcuts, with each one for a group of folders – one for “Courses”, one for “Admin,” one for “Research Projects,” etc. (I’m also thinking of organizing them within Launch Center Pro, much like I’ve been doing for different groups of playlists, but that’s another story). For each shortcut, I use “Choose from List” to select the “FolderName” variable from a List, and then insert that into the “Get File” action. See the link to a illustration shortcut (for three courses) here:
https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/a37d1754f7ab4d0292875f21c2f65cbf

The problem is that, in iCloud, this seems to work only if I store all 30+GB of files within the folder "iCloud/Shortcuts/. Is this correct? Is there no alternative? If not, is it really a problem? Has anyone tried moving all their iCloud files and folders to within the /Shortcuts/ folder?

1 Like
2

If you want Shortcuts to have unfettered access on iCloud, then yes. Using Dropbox would give you more scope for file interactions as the Sandboxing rules don’t apply to it.

I’m struggling to give a definitive reason why you shouldn’t store all of the files in the Shortcuts folder. It does feel wrong, but if there’s nothing app speific elsewhere stopping you from doing it, and sharing isn’t an issue, then I guess you could.

But it just still feels wrong to me. I think it’s just the sandboxing and access constraints that make me wary. I’m not a convert to iCloud (I have many cloud storage buckets at my disposal) so maybe that’s another reason why I’d be reluctant.

Maybe just try it out for a few weeks with a speific set of files and report back on your experience?

1 Like
3

I have about 40GB of files in the Shortcuts sub folder in iCloud. I started the process with workflow and it worked then. I have had no issues since migrating to the Shortcuts app.