18 iPhone Files App Tips

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here's some tips for using the Files App on your iPhone. 

The Files App on your iPhone is kind of like the Finder on your Mac. This is how you access and manage the files you've got, both locally on your iPhone and in iCloud Drive. Often when you first go to the Files App you'll see a screen like this. You're either looking at a specific folder inside, say, of iCloud Drive or you might be looking at Recents. If you want to get to the top level, though, it doesn't look like there's an obvious way to do that. You could certainly go to Browse and then use button at the top left browse back up different levels. 

But a quick way to get to the top level is to first go to Browse. So you may need to tap once on the Browse button at the bottom if you're not already there. But once you're there tap Browse a second time and this takes you all the way to the top level. Now when you're at this top level you'll see all the different locations under Locations. You're also going to see a section called Favorites. This is where you want to put the folders you access the most. So, you can go into, say, iCloud Drive  maybe into your Documents folder and decide that this folder is one you need to access often. Now tap and hold that folder to bring up the Context Menu. Then scroll down and tap Favorites. Now when you go to the top level under Favorites you'll see that folder there. You can always tap a folder here and then Remove it from Favorites so you can keep one there temporarily while you're working on a project and then remove it later on when you need it as much. 

So you notice the Files App defaults to Icon View here. But you don't have to stick with that. A better way to look at it, in my opinion, is to tap the three dots here and switch to List View. Then everything is here in a list. You get a little more information plus you can open up any one of these folders, like that, and continue to view things in a List at that same level while also viewing things inside of folders. This makes it a lot easier, for instance, to Drag & Drop something into a folder like that. In List View it is much more useful to sort the way you want. The three dots button at the top gives you access to Sorting Options. So, for instance, instead of sorting by name you can sort, say, by Date. If you ever want to change the sort order go back in and select the same item again. Notice is says Newest to Oldest. But if I select it again it changes the order and now it says Oldest to Newest. 

In addition to Sorting you can also go down to View Options. You can choose Grouping. So you can see Sort By there but also Group By. So I can Group By Kind and now I can see folders grouped together, Documents after that, Music, Movies, and so on. Also in View Options notice you can make the Icons more compact and choose whether or not File Name Extensions are shown. 

Now as you can imagine the Search box here at the top, you can use that to Search By File Name. Also by things that are inside the file like text inside word processing document. But you can also Search for files by Kind. So, for instance, if I know I want to find a Numbers document and I know I don't have that many of them I can Search in all of the folders seen here by just typing Numbers. You can see it gives me the option here to Search for Number Spreadsheets. Now it just is going to show me files of that kind regardless of the name or contents of the file. Remember when Searching to choose your Search Scope at the top. Here I'm looking at Recents but I could search the entire iCloud Drive or just the folder that I happened to be in when I started the search. 

Another great thing you can do with Search, is Search By Date. So how would you do that exactly? Well, you could type a specific date in. So, for instance, I can look for something for April 1st and you can see it comes up with the date. I can select that and it will show me those results. But I can also Search By Month. For instance I can search for April, like this. You can see it will give me the options to look at all the files in April. I can type the year as well. I can also use some other date related terms. Like, for instance, I can search for Yesterday and find files from then. 

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Now you may be aware that with the last version macOS we can now easily color and place an icon or symbol on folders. You can do the same thing in the Files App in iOS 26. So, for instance, I want to make say this folder look a little different. I can tap and hold it and then choose Customize Folder and Tags. I can then choose a tag and it will take on the color of that tag there. I can then also choose one of these symbols or tap emoji here and choose an emoji character to get it to look like that. Now you can see the folder stands out.

Now when you want to do something with more than one file you may know that you can tap the three dots here, then tap select, and then you can select the file that you want and then use one of the controls here to do something with them. Or, start dragging and it drags all four of those. But you can also do the same with multi-touch without ever needing to go into that menu. So, for instance, I can tap and hold this file here and start dragging it. With another finger I can tap a second file and a third file and now I'm dragging three files. I can use that to move into another folder. I can go to the Home Screen and Drag & Drop into an app or anything you would normally do with a drag.

Notice here that thanks to iCloud not all of these files are local on my iPhone. If I wanted open this file right here you could see it's currently not cached locally. It's in iCloud only. If I tap it once it downloads and I can open it. I may not even notice the delay. But if I want to make sure that a file is always local, because perhaps I know I'm going to be offline soon, you can tap and hold and bring up the menu and then not only select Download now to cache the file locally now, but also keep downloading which will make sure that file stays downloaded all the time. In fact you could do the same thing with an entire folder. So if I know I need the stuff in this folder to be accessed offline at all times I can select Keep Downloaded for this folder here and now that's setup for this folder. It will download anything that's not already downloaded and you can see that symbol there indicating all the stuff is always going to be cached locally so I can use it even when I'm not online. 

Now when you delete a file in the Files App, like for instance this file right here, I can tap and hold and then select Delete. If that was a mistake I can recover it just by going to the top, like that, and then going to Recently Deleted. Then I'll find that file there. But I don't have to drag it out and then move it up into that folder again. Perhaps I don't even remember where it originally was. I can instead tap and hold and Recover. What Recover will do is it is going to place it back in the folder where it was originally located. So you can see it is back there. So this is just a safety net saving the file for 30 days in case you accidentally deleted something. It also remembers the original location. 

If you need to delete things quickly note that you have more options than tapping and holding and then selecting delete. You can also tap the three dots button and then select and select many files and then use the Trash Can icon there to delete all the ones that are selected. But in List View, and this is a good reason to use List View, you can also swipe right to left and you can see the Delete Button appears there. Continue swiping and it will delete without you needing to confirm, BUT swipe just a little bit and stop and now you can tap that button. But they will all end up with the files there in Recently Deleted in case it was a mistake. 

In addition to dragging and dropping to move things around from folder to folder in the Files App, there are a couple of ways to do it that are probably a little bit more straightforward. One is to use Copy & Paste. So I can take this file right here. I will tap and hold it to bring up the Context Menu and then I'm going to Copy it. That's not going to do anything right now. It will still be there. But I can now go to another folder, like this folder right here, and what I want to do is go to all the way to the bottom where there is some blank space. Tap and hold there. Now I get the option to Paste. Pasting will paste a copy of the file that I just copied. But if I want to move it there I can select Move Item Here. Then this puts this file, you can see it right there, in this folder. So to move it back I can do the same thing. I'll Copy. I'll go back up here, go into this folder, and you can see it's not there anymore. I'll go to the bottom here, tap and hold, and I will move it, NOT paste it there. Now it's back where it was before. 

But there's another way to move files. If you tap and hold like this there's a Move button here at the top. Tap that and it seems like now you're just in the Files App again. But what you're doing is you're actually looking for a new location for that file. So I'll go into Documents and into Examples here and if I tap Move it'll move it to that new location. 

Another thing you can do with that Context Menu is you can tap and hold a file there to bring it up. Then you can use Open With. So instead of just one tap and it will open up the file in the default app, Open With will give you a selection of apps. For instance, this Text File can be opened in either Numbers or Pages. You may have even more apps that can open text files. You also have an option under  Open With where you can select to have a preview with QuickLook. This will mean that instead of tapping the file and it will now Open in the default's app, it will actually go to QuickLook to allow you to preview it. You can tap the app at the bottom to then Open it now that you've confirmed it's the right file. 

Here's a tip you can use even before you get into the Files App. If you tap and hold the Files icon you can go straight to Search to start a search and straight to the top level of iCloud Drive or the top level of your local storage here. So, for instance, if I select this one it goes in the Files App but takes me right to the top level of iCloud Drive. 

Here's one last tip. You may have noticed that when I go to the top level of Browse I see this symbol here. This is for Goggle Drive. You may see that or others there. Like One Drive and other cloud storage services. The reason I've got the Goggle Drive Icon there is because I installed the Goggle Drive App which gives iOS certain abilities to be able to access Goggle Drive. It wouldn't be there unless I had the Goggle Drive App installed. The same thing for One Drive. You're not going to see One Drive here unless you install the official One Drive App from Microsoft. So if you want to access files from these other cloud systems in the Files App, first install the official app from that service. Then you'll see it here. Then you could tap it and it will ask if you want to turn on access to those files here in the Files App. If you're using several Cloud Services it could be really convenient to have them all there in the Files App instead of having to go to the individual apps for that service. 

Hope you found these tips for using the Files App on your iPhone useful. Thanks for watching.