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Are you on Mac? Then you don't need Loom

· 2 min read

Mac OS itself includes screen recording software. With a few tricks, you can easily upload recorded screens to your Google Drive without needing additional software like Loom.

Screen Recording with QuickTime​

  1. Simply press the keyboard shortcut Cmd+Shift+5 and select the recording area.
  2. Before confirming the recording, you can click "Options" to adjust the audio source (or mute it) and also choose the location of the resulting file.

Automatic File Compression​

The biggest problem with recording screens using QuickTime is that the resulting file is data-intensive. A 5-minute video is 300 MB large.

If you want to share a video note or guide with your team, you probably don’t want to wait 30 minutes for the upload or processing in the tool you use (Notion, Slack, Google Drive).

I use the following automation:

  1. Using the Automator program, I monitor the folder where I save screen recordings.
  2. If a file in the MOV format is added, I automatically start my pre-prepared script.
  3. The script takes the added file, adjusts its size to 720p, and changes the compression.
  4. The result is a file that is only 5% of the original file size (!), so instead of 300 MB, the file is only 15 MB.
  5. I automatically save the resulting file to another folder, which automatically syncs to Google Drive.

Result​

  1. Press Cmd+Shift+5.
  2. Record my video.
  3. Wait for the conversion and upload to Google Drive.
  4. Go to drive.google.com and directly copy the link to the recorded video or directly upload it to Slack or Notion.