Categories
Photography

Automate Screen Brightness for Photography Apps

Learn how to use Apple Shortcuts to automatically change screen brightness when opening or closing apps like Glass or Darkroom.

Several years ago I posted about a “Glass Time” shortcut. When activated it opened the social media application I use to post and view photography — Glass — and then increased the brightness to 100%. The intent was to ensure I was looking at images closer to how the photographer intended.

The only issue was that I needed to remember to activate the shortcut instead of opening the application itself. This worked but was a bit clunky, and so I’ve created a more pleasant way to achieve the same thing.

Enter some Apple Shortcuts and Automations.

Mission Statement

I wanted my screen brightness to jump to 100% whenever I opened Glass or my photo editor (Darkroom) and then drop back down to 50% once I closed them.

Components

To make this work I had to create Apple Shortcuts and Automations. The shortcuts handle the brightness setting and the automations tell your device when to run those shortcuts. Specifically, I needed an:

  • Apple Shortcut that, when activated, increased the screen brightness to 100%
  • Apple Shortcut that, when activated, reduced the screen brightness to 50%
  • Apple Automation that triggered 100% brightness when opening Glass, and a separate Apple Automation that did the same thing when opening Darkroom.
  • Apple Automation that triggered 50% brightness when closing Glass, and a separate Apple Automation that did the same thing when closing Darkroom.

Building and Linking Components

The process for creating the various components was very easy. To create the underlying Apple Shortcuts:

  1. Open Apple Shortcuts
  2. Tap/click the “ ” button, and in the search bar search for “Set Brightness”
  3. Set the Brightness slider to 100%. Modify the name of the shortcut to something like “Set Brightness 100%”.
  4. Create a second shortcut the same way, but set the slider at 50%. Name the shortcut something like “Set Brightness 50%.”

To create the automations to trigger the different screen brightness levels:

  1. Open the main screen of Apple Shortcuts.
  2. Tap/click “Automation” on the menu bar.
  3. Tap/click the “ ” button to create a new automation. Select “App” in the menu, choose either Glass or Darkroom (or another application of your preference), and the radio button “Is Opened.” Have the automation run immediately. Tap/click “Next”.
  4. In the next screen, scroll to find your Apple Shortcuts “Set Brightness 100%” in “My Shortcuts.” Your automation is now completed and the brightness will go to 100% when opening the relevant application.
  5. Repeat steps 1-4, but modify the radio button chosen in step 3 to “Is Closed”, and in step 4 choose the “Set Brightness 50%” shortcut.

Limitations of Automations

Your Apple Shortcuts will sync between all of your Apple devices through iCloud but this will not occur with your Apple Automations. This means that you’ll need to repeat the automation steps on all of your devices that you want the automation to activate on.