How To Use The iPhone Files App

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's take a look at the Files App on your iPhone. 

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So the Files App may be one of the most important apps on your iPhone. It's basically the equivalent to the Finder but on your iPhone. You can use it to access files, both local files and files in iCloud Drive. You can also use it to access files that are located in other Cloud Systems like Dropbox. The Files App is built into iOS. So you should see it on your Home Screen, somewhere. If not you can always go to the App Library and search for it there. I'm using iOS 15.2 here on the iPhone. But the Files App hasn't changed much recently and you should see a similar set of functionality if you're using the Files App on the iPad as well. 

So when you go into Files you go to where you were last. So this could be at the top level here. But it also could be in Recents which is just a list of all the files you've recently accessed. It also could be down one or more levels. So, for instance, you may be looking at something like this and you could just use the Back button all the way at the top to get to the top level. Go to Browse and then you'll see this level here. There's a Search Box at the top and several different sections. You've got Locations, which shows you the primary location where files are stored. This is kind of the equivalent on your Mac to different drives. You might have your Internal Drive, you may have an External Drive, you may have a Network Location, and you could have iCloud Drive as well. Then you've got Favorites which you'll be able to customize. Under that you've got Tags which we will look at later. 

So, under Locations the default things you should see are iCloud Drive, which is probably where you have all of your files. Anything stored in iCloud Drive will be available across all your devices. So maybe your iPhone, your iPad, and your Mac. You'll be able to see anything stored in iCloud Drive stored on one of those devices in all of them. But there's also On My iPhone. This is the equivalent to locally stored files. Files that are not saved to the Cloud at all, they're only on the iPhone locally. If you're like me you never store anything in here. Then you see a special section for anything you have Shared with anybody else. Also a trash can or bin, called Recently Deleted, which shows you files after you delete them and they will stay there for a period of time before they are deleted forever. 

Now you can customize this using this button here at the top. Here you could see Edit and there are things here you could turn On or Off. For instance, if you don't want to see On My iPhone at all you can turn that Off. In addition, if you have installed apps that are associated with other Cloud services, like Dropbox, then you'll see something here where you can turn that On. If you turn that On you could see Dropbox listed here and you can access all of your Dropbox files there. You don't have to use the Dropbox to have to get to them although these custom apps could have more features than what you see here in Files. If we go into iCloud Drive you're going to see exactly the same folders you would see on iCloud Drive on your Mac and you would be able to go into anyone of them and could navigate around like you would expect if you were using the Finder on the Mac. 

So I'll go here into the Projects Folder and I see a bunch of files here. I could stick with this Icon View but it's probably more useful to tap here and then switch to List View. Then List View allows you to see one item per row and you could scroll up and down easily. You could also see more information such as the Last Modified Date and the Size of each of those files. You may sometimes see a Cloud icon like this here on the right. That tells you that while the file is available to you its contents are currently stored online, not locally. So when you go to open that file it's going to need a download first. If it's a small file you may not even notice the delay. Anything without that is cached locally. So while it is part of iCloud Drive in this case the contents are already here on your iPhone ready to go and it should open instantly. 

So I can tap to open a file here. So let me tap on this one. Since it's a Pages file it is going to open the Pages App and it's going to, in this case, download the file from iCloud and then open it up. I can go into Edit mode in Pages and I'm working with it in Pages. If I go back to the Files App I'll see there are files here that may not have an equivalent app on the iPhone. For instance here's a file that was created in TextEdit. There is no version of TextEdit on the iPhone. So when you tap to select this it actually shows you a preview of this file in the Files App. If I look here I could see I'm still in Files. So this allows you to Preview files, things like pdf's, text files, and images without having to open up another app. If I scroll down here here's an image and I can tap on that. You could see it's going to download it and it's actually a video. I can view it here. Notice that I am still in the Files App here. So you can actually view videos, you can play audio, and you can view photos and pinch and enlarge them and all of that inside of the Files App. 

So Files isn't just a files browser. It's also a preview tool allowing you to view the contents of many different types of files. As a matter of fact if I wanted to open a Pages file but just view it in the Files App without going to Pages I could tap and hold and then select QuickLook right here and I'd be looking at it inside of the Files App without opening a new app. Now much like with Preview on the Mac you can open a pdf or image file and you can use Markup Tools to draw and add items to the pdf or image. So in a way the Files App in iOS is kind of a combination of the Finder and the Preview Apps on your Mac. 

Now there are whole bunch of other file functions you can do if you tap and hold on any file. You've got Get Info and it will show you a ton of information for that file including a little preview there at the top. You can also choose Rename to rename a file and you can see you can just type the name there. You can compress or archive the file into zip format just like you can in the Mac Finder. You can Duplicate the file. You can Copy it and then once you have a file copied you can go to a new location in the Files App and you can Paste it or use Move to move it there. You can also Delete it right here or you can use Share to share in a variety of different ways. So Sharing could be something like using AirDrop or sending an email or message. It could also mean sharing it using iCloud there creating a shared location that you can then send somebody the link to. Sharing is also a way to open a file in a different app in the default. So if you've got a document that normally would be opened by some app you can now go to the list here and see what other apps can be used to open that file. You can also Drag a file to move it. So let's take this file here. I'm going to just tap and hold until I can drag it up here to the top and you'll see that it will activate that button there. I can actually go up and then go into another folder, like the Desktop folder here, and I can drop it there. 

Now you have lots of options when viewing files. You can tap here and we saw before how we can switch between Icon View and List View. You could also change the order in which things are sorted. So I've got this sorted by Name and you could do it ascending or again to do it descending. You could switch between those two. You have Kind, Date, Size, and also the Tags it uses. You can also use Groups and it will group things like this. So you've got Folders, you've got Documents, Images, and once you've turned Groups on you have Group By down here and you could choose other things like Group By Date or Size. You also have the ability here to use Select and this allows you to Select more than one file at a time. So you can Select several files, for instance, and once you have those selected you can do one of the things at the bottom. So you can Share those files, you can Create a New Folder with them, you can Duplicate them, you can Delete them, or even more things right here at the bottom. Another option here is to Create New Folders. So that's how you would create a new folder in the Files App. Then you have this handy thing right here where you can start a document scan using your iPhones camera right here and it would Save this scan that you take right to this location in the Files App. 

Now back at the top level here you have the ability to Add To Favorites. Right now there's just the Download in Favorites. If I go there it takes me to my Downloads Folder.  Actually if I go back it won't go back to that top level. It will go back up one level to iCloud Drive, which is where the Downloads Folder is located. Now if I wanted to add something else to Favorites I would just go to the item first. So let's go to my Documents folder and then to that Projects folder. I'm going to tap and hold and I'm going to select Favorite. Now when I go back to the top level here you could see Projects and Downloads are both there. If I tap and hold I could drag them up and down to rearrange them. I could also tap here to Edit. This is where I can remove an item from Favorites. 

The last section here is Tags. So Tags work just like Tags in the Finder. I can tap on anyone of these here to see Files that I've tagged with something. If I want to Tag a file I would go to it. So let's go to File here and let's Tap and Hold and you could see I've got tags. Now I can select a tag, like purple. I can add a new tag by tapping there and typing. When I'm done I could go back to the top level. If I want to see all the files that are tagged purple I can tap there and you can see the one is there. You could also, of course, use Search up here to search for things. You can search for file names. You can search for content of some types of files. You can search for Tags. So you see here I've searched for test and I can leave it at that and it will give me files that have test in the name. I could also tap here and look for things that have the word test inside them. I could also tap here to select tags. So, in this case, there is a tag called test and these two files have that tag applied. 

There is one more item under this called Connect to Server. That allows you to connect to File Sharing on your local network or even a very remote network if it is set up that way. Now I mentioned before that you can compress files in the Files App. The Files App also works decompressed. In the Downloads Folder, in fact, I have an archive here that's a dot zip file. If I tap and hold that you see I can uncompress it there. I also can tap it once and it will do that. So you can see it is uncompressed and there are two files in a folder now. You can also tap and hold and notice that if I select QuickLook it comes up with just an icon there telling you the size and all that. But you also have Preview Content. So you can tap here and actually preview the items that are inside of a zip file before you unzip it. That's kind of handy especially here in the Downloads Folder which is the default location for saving files when you're browsing the web and sometimes downloading email attachments. They should end up here in the iCloud Downloads Folder and you can preview what's inside the zip file before you uncompress it. 

Now you see aspects of the Finder in a File Save or a File Open dialogue on the Mac.  So when I open Pages here you can see I'm in Pages yet this looks a lot like the Files App and I can dig down into iCloud Drive and find a file here and open it up and then I go back up from the actual document. You can see here I'm at that location. Then, of course, when you're in the Files App there's also Recents down here which sometimes is the only place people go. This will just show you your most recent documents right here. So it's easy to be able to find what you have just been working on or were working on yesterday or the day before by looking at Recents. I find, of course, it works best to look in List View and see them shown that way. Then you could just open up those files. If you use iCloud Drive a lot you may want to leave a lot of the file management to your Mac doing it all there and only really use the Files App on your iPhone or the iPad to access the most recent files from Recents.

Of course if you don't have a Mac, if you've chosen to use your iPad as your primary computing device or even your iPhone, then the Files App is going to be definitely something you want to be very familiar with, know how to use so you can keep your files all organized, and know where everything is. 

I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.