An app that I get a tonne of requests to cover on this channel is the Files app, an app that
you can download on your iPhone or iPad.
It bridges the gap between your Apple devices, allowing you easy access to files that you
might access and work on over on your Mac, via your iPhone or iPad, and when you consider
how many apps now run on multiple Apple devices, the Files app is actually really useful.
But a lot of people find it quite confusing, so in this video I’m going to take a deep-dive
into the app, and cover everything that you can do in the Files app on your iPhone.
Stick with me to the end of the video, I definitely think there are going to be a few features
of this app that most people won’t have been aware of.
OK, let’s get into it.
So, first up, the Files app looks like this on your iPhone, and it should be available
already on your phone, it’s a stock app, but if you don’t have it or you’ve deleted
it in the past, you can download it from the App Store.
When you open it up, the Files app seems to remember where you were in the app the last
time that you used it, even if you hard restart the app, and it will open up back where you
left off, which can be useful, but can also be confusing if you’ve not used the app
in a long time.
So a good tip to keep in mind is that, at any point, if you tap this Browse button down
here at the bottom, it will jump you back to the Home Page in files as it were.
Here on the Browse screen, we’ve got a few options.
We can search, which I’ll cover separately in a moment, we can then explore various different
file locations, and then we’ve got our favourites underneath.
At the bottom next to the Browse button is a Recents button, which is exactly what it
sounds like, any files that we’ve accessed recently are going to be shown in here.
In terms of locations, a couple of these are going to be standard and visible on everyone’s
app, but Dropbox for example might not be visible on yours, and that’s because Dropbox
is of course a third party app that you might not have installed on your phone.
If you have, like I have, you have the option of viewing your Dropbox account using the
Files app.
You don’t have to have this visible by the way, if you tap this menu icon up in the top
right, and then choose Edit, you can toggle it on or off, as well as change the order
of the options here, and this would of course also work with other apps like Drive or Box,
I don’t know the full list but I’d imagine most cloud apps would work.
iCloud Drive is exactly what it sounds like, it’s your iCloud Drive, and this syncs files
across all of your connected devices like your iPad or your Mac.
‘On my iPhone’ is also exactly what it sounds like, it’s any files stored locally
on your iPhone.
I personally don’t use this very much at all, but if you ever need to download something
locally to your phone, this is where it would be stored.
‘Shared’ shows you folders and documents that you’ve shared with other people up
here at the top, and that other people have shared with you down here.
Recently Deleted is exactly what it sounds like it is.
Very quickly, I mentioned in the previous section that you could connect Dropbox or
similar cloud services, you can also connect to a local network if that’s applicable
to you, you would tap this menu button in the upper right, and then choose Connect to
Server.
You’d then follow the steps, providing the relevant details to connect to your server.
And, I’m going to bounce to my iPad to show you this, if you connect an external drive
like an SSD, you can access the files on that SSD via the Files app.
I’ve used my iPad because that has a USB C port on it, ready to go, but you could of
course get a USB C to lightning adaptor, and do this on your iPhone also.
Speaking of SSD drives, I want to take a moment to say a massive thank you to Samsung for
sponsoring this video.
This is the T7 Shield, Samsung’s new SSD and the latest addition to their T7 range,
it sits alongside the regular T7 and the T7 Touch.
It’s called the shield because this is Samsung’s rugged SSD.
The T7 drives have always been known to be small and ultra portable, but a drive made
out of a hard plastic shell could still suffer some pretty serious damage if you drop it,
something that’s much more likely if you’re travelling around with it.
With the T7 Shield, you’re getting robustness and heat dissipation from it’s full metal
aluminium body, and protection from external shocks thanks to the rubber that covers it.
Samsung claim that this thing can withstand drops of up to three metres or 9.8 feet, and
it’s IP65 certification means it’s got fantastic water and dust resistance.
The T7 Shield uses NVMe protocol to take full advantage of the USB 3.2 Gen2 interface, offering
a bandwidth of up to 10Gbps.
The drive offers read/write speeds of up to 1050 and 1000 MB/s respectively, which is
more than 1.9 times faster than current SATA based portable SSDs, and more than 9.5 times
faster than external HDDs.
The T7 Shield also provides outstanding sustained read and write performance for heavy, continuous
tasks like video recording, editing and encoding.
It’s got wide compatibility options, so whether you’re planning on using this on
Windows PC, Mac, mobile phone or tablet, you’re good to go, and it does pretty well in the
eco-friendly department too - the packaging is made from an eco friendly pulp material
to minimise carbon emissions in production.
It comes in this nice beige colour that I’ve got here, but also a matte black and a really
vibrant blue, with 1 and 2TB variations of each available.
If you want to pick one up, I’ll include a link in the description of this video.
Let’s jump into a folder in my iCloud Drive so that we can have a look at some specifics
related to creating and managing files.
So, we’re in a folder, and now if I tap this icon up in the top right, you can see
that we’ve got a number of different options available.
Select is the standard iPhone select function that allows you to tap to select multiple
items in a folder, and you can then apply an edit to all of those items, all at the
same time.
New Folder is what it sounds like, it’s going to create a new folder within this folder,
which you can of course name.
Scan documents brings up your phone’s camera in the scanner mode, and allows you to scan
a document right into the folder, saved as a PDF.
You then have another Connect to Server option, the same as the one that we looked at earlier
on in the video.
You can choose to view the contents of the folder as a list, or as icons, and either
way you can choose to use Groups, which is this option down at the bottom.
Groups will group together files based on which option you choose, either the kind of
file that they are, the date that they were last edited or their size.
I find type to be particularly useful here, but you could of course choose whatever option
suits you the best.
You can also sort by Name, Kind, Date last edited, Size or Tags, and the arrow here is
referring to ascending or descending mode.
I don’t have any tags in use at the moment, but in the next section, where we look at
file options, we’re going to create one.
Let’s take a moment to look at how we can manage files and folders.
If we take the scanned document that we scanned in earlier as an example, I’m going to tap
and hold on the document for a moment to bring up this menu.
Get Info will show me information about the file, and you’ve got the Show More and Show
Less buttons to show you more or less information respectively.
Down at the bottom here you can add tags, so I’m going to tap on that and add a tag.
Back on the file options, you can rename the file using this option here.
You can compress the file using this option here.
This is useful, but I think where it’s most useful is if you have multiple files, and
you want to send them to someone, it’s often easier to compress them into a Zip file before
you send them.
I’ll use the next button, Duplicate to create a second file, and then I’m going to tap
up here in the top right of the screen, and choose Select, then select both documents.
Then I’m going to tap down here in the bottom right of the screen.
You can see that we can create a PDF from these files, we can copy them and then paste
them elsewhere, we can create a brand new folder with them, or we can compress them.
I’ll tap on that.
And the Zip archive is created.
It’s kind of a shame that it doesn’t give you the option to name the archive as you
create it, but what we can do is tap and hold for a second on the Zip archive we just created,
and then choose Rename, and that gives us the option to rename it.
Let me tap and hold back on the file again for a moment, just to finish up in here.
We can use Quick Look to have a preview of the file.
Because this is a PDF, we can use the Markup tool by tapping the pen icon here, and then
you’ve got all of these pen options down at the bottom.
You can manage the tags associated with the file, you can copy and move the file, and
you can share it with someone else, and tapping on that gives you all of the usual sharing
options.
You’ve also got a separate Markup button here, and a Delete button.
And just to show you, the options within a Folder are much the same, as you can see here.
If we jump back to the Browse screen, notice that because we tagged a file, we’ve now
got a tag showing in the Tags section, and if I tap on it, we’ll see the files that
we tagged.
This is obviously why Tags can be really useful, it’s an extra way to help you organise your
files, without having to put files into specific folders, and it’s of course up to you how
you decide to implement them.
If you’re using tags for work, you might have tags related to projects.
If you’re using them for your personal life, you might have tags related to specific people,
or occasions.
Search is of course extremely helpful when working with a Files app, and there are two
places where you can search.
The first is here, within the app, you just tap into the search field, and type whatever
it is that you’d like to search for.
This could be the name of a file, or a folder, or a tag.
So if I search for the term ‘contracts’, you can see that a relevant folder called
‘Contracts etc’ has shown up in my results, but also the tag ‘contracts’.
If I search for the word ‘test’, you can see that a number of files and folders have
been found that contain the word ‘test’ somewhere in the name.
Up here, you’ve got a document with a magnifying glass icon, and it says ‘Contains Test’.
This is because the app has also located documents that contain the word ‘test’, but don’t
necessarily have it in the title, so if I tap here, I can then view those documents.
You can see that this gives you some pretty powerful searching options.
I mentioned another place where you could search, and that’s the spotlight search
of the phone itself.
If I head to the spotlight search part of the phone, and type in test, then scroll down,
you can see that Files is included within the Spotlight Search.
The phone will try and suggest the most suitable options, but if you then tap ‘search in
app’, the app will open and run the search for you.
Obviously, a crucial part of the Files app is going to be to have it play nice with other
apps on your phone.
After all, where’s the point in having all your files available, if you can’t access
them?
So, let me show you a few examples of how you might use the Files app with other apps
on your device.
First up, email.
Here’s an example email that I’ve drafted, and I want to attach a file to it.
Here in the bar above my keyboard, we’ve got a document icon.
If I tap that, the Files app opens, in the Recents tab, but we could of course use the
Browse tab to navigate around Files, like I’ve been showing you in this video.
Simply tap on a file to immediately add it to your email.
In Notes - I’ll go to Files first, find the file that I want to add to a Note, tap
and hold to view the associated options, choose Share, then choose Notes.
I can create a New Note or I can add it to an existing note.
Here’s a website in Safari where I can convert a file.
To do that, you tap the Choose File button, to find a file to upload.
When you do that, you’ve got the option to choose from the Photo Library, or take
a photo or video, or choose Files.
This opens up the Files app, as we’ve already seen.
And, if I go ahead and upload the file to convert it, you can see that once it’s completed,
we get this download option.
If I tap download, that’s now downloaded, but you might not be sure where it’s gone
to.
Open Files, go to Browse, go to Downloads, and the file is there.
And, in suitable applications, you can use Drag and Drop to move a file from Files, into
another app.
You need to use both hands to do this, but let me show you.
If I tap and hold this file in Files, and then just move my thumb a little to let my
iPhone know that I want to drag this file.
Now, keeping my thumb on the screen the entire time, with my finger on my other hand, I’m
going to swipe up on the screen to go back to the Home Screen, and then I’m going to
open notes, and navigate to an empty note.
Then, with the note open, I’m going to let go of my thumb, which has been on the screen
the entire time, and that drops the file into the note that I’ve just created.
Clever right?
Oh and if you’re operating on a phone with a Home button, the process is identical, but
instead of swiping up to get to the Home Screen, you tap the home button instead, but you still
keep your original thumb or finger on the screen the entire time.
And that, honestly is everything, that’s a pretty intense deep-dive into the Files
app.
I’ll be honest, dedicated file services like Dropbox have prettier, better functioning
apps, but for what this is, a method of bridging the gap between all of your devices, it’s
pretty good.
What about you, do you use Files for anything that I’ve not covered in this video?
Any tips I missed out?
Drop me a comment, and let me know.
And as ever, if you found this video useful, do please consider leaving me a like, and
subscribing to my channel for more content like this in the future.
See you on the next video.