Automating File Conversions with CloudConvert
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Automating File Conversions with CloudConvert
The most common questions from Club MacStories members involve some kind of file conversion. Whether it’s about converting PDFs to images (by far, the most frequent request we receive for this column) or exporting documents to formats that aren’t natively supported on iOS, I’ve read dozens of emails about converting files with Workflow over the past few months. I know what my solution was going to look like in the end, but I also wanted to take my time to do it right and provide a full-featured workflow that would solve everyone’s problems. This week, after I was done with my iOS 11 concept and before leaving for WWDC, I finally had the time to create the workflow I’ve been thinking about for a while.
I’ve been using a service called CloudConvert to handle “special” file conversions for the past year or so. CloudConvert is a web app and an API that integrates with other automation tools (such as Zapier) to receive files, convert them in the cloud, and feed them back to you in a different format. While a web service for file conversions may seem redundant, consider this: CloudConvert supports over 200 file types, and it can queue multiple conversions in the background and notify you when they’re done with a link to download the converted file. This means that it doesn’t matter if you don’t have an app that can convert PDFs to PNGs, and it won’t be an issue if your old iPad is too slow to encode a 200 MB .MOV video file to .MP4 – CloudConvert can process the conversion in the cloud on your behalf. CloudConvert’s support for multiple file formats (some examples: 3GP, FLAC, and even Numbers/Pages files), combined with its extensible platform, makes it possible to send anything we want to the service and integrate its API directly with Workflow on iOS.