iPhone:
Saving, sharing and deleting files
This course explains how you can save files to your iPhone's Files app, so you can access them later with ease - even without mobile data coverage or Wi-Fi. You'll also learn how to share saved documents and delete unwanted files to save space on your iPhone.
Watch our animation by pressing the Play button below, or click on the handy chapters icon in the video playbar (it is the third icon from the right) to go straight to the information you want to see, such as how to:
- understand the Files app
- open an email
- save an email attachment to the Files app
- use Search to find the Files app on your iPhone
- open and view a saved file
- share a file from your Files app
- delete a file from your Files app.
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Transcript
Welcome to the 'iPhone: Saving, sharing and deleting files' course. You'll learn how to safely save an important file, onto your iPhone, find a file and share it using email. You'll also learn how to securely delete a file when you no longer need it. If your iPhone has a physical Home button, some of the steps might be slightly different, but you can still follow along. You can use your iPhone to keep important documents and other files close to hand. For instance, if your travel agent emails you a travel itinerary, you can open the file on your iPhone using your email app. But it can be a hassle to have to search your inbox each time you need to find the file, so we'll look at how you can save it to your iPhone and access it later, using the Files app. The Files app is the place on your iPhone where saved files are stored. You don't even have to be connected to the internet to access saved files. So, if we save our travel itinerary to Files, we'll be able to access it whenever we need it. We have received a travel itinerary in an email. Let's see how to save it to the Files app. Begin by opening the Mail app to find the email with the itinerary attached. You can find the Mail app on the Home screen. Tap it to open Mail.
The Inbox view opens and shows a list of recent emails. Our travel agent has just sent us an itinerary for our trip, so it appears as a new email at the top. Tap on the email to open and read it. While it can be safe to open and read an email, never click on a link or open an attachment, you're unsure about. A link or file inside an email may contain viruses or other unwanted software. Now the email is open, we can see the itinerary document in the body of the email. There are a couple of steps for saving the itinerary. First, tap the preview image of the document in the body of the email to open and view its full screen. Next, look for the Share icon at the bottom of the screen. It looks like a box with an arrow pointing up out of it. Tap on it. The Share panel will appear. Look for Save to Files and tap it. Next, make sure the On My iPhone option is highlighted in grey. If it's not, tap it to select it. When you're done, tap Save in the top right corner. The Share options panel will slide away, which means the itinerary has been saved onto your phone.
Let's see how to find and read the itinerary using Files. Swipe up from the bottom of your phone to go to the Home screen. From here, we can use a handy shortcut to find the Files app. Swipe down from the middle of the Home screen, and the Search bar and keyboard will appear. Type in Files. The Files app icon will appear as a suggestion. Tap the icon and the Files app will open. There are two options at the bottom of the screen. If Browse isn't already selected, tap it. When Browse is selected it will be blue. All the documents that have been saved to the Files app on your iPhone, will appear here, in the On My iPhone screen. If you can't see On My iPhone at the top of the page, select the arrow in the top left to see the Browse options. Tap On My iPhone to see all the files that have been saved to the Files app on your iPhone. Here's the itinerary file that we saved earlier. Files has a lot of features to help you keep files on your iPhone organised, but for now we're going to focus on opening this travel itinerary. In this demonstration we don't have many files saved, so it's easy to see the itinerary. But you can also use the Search bar to find a file you've saved. To open the itinerary, tap on it. It's a good idea to save important documents to the Files app when you might not have access to Wi-Fi or mobile data, like when travelling. Even though you don't have internet, you can still access your files. When you've finished, tap Done in the top left corner to close the itinerary and see the On My iPhone screen again. Once you have saved a file to your iPhone, you can easily share it with other people. In this demonstration, we're going to send the itinerary to a friend as an email attachment.
First, we're going to tap and hold the itinerary. To do so, simply leave your finger on the screen for a moment longer than a normal tap, until a menu of options appears. Next, find the Share option, which looks like a box with an arrow pointing up out of it. Tap on it. The Share panel appears and shows different ways you can share files and other content from your iPhone. It's worth exploring the many options here, but for now, let's find the Mail icon. It looks like an envelope on a blue background. Now, tap on it. A New Message screen appears, with the itinerary already included as an email attachment. Tap the To box, and the keyboard appears. Enter your friend's email address.
Next tap the Subject box and type in the subject of the email. If you tap just above the attachment, you can add a message to your email, but we're not going to do so for this demonstration. When you're ready to send the email, tap the Send arrow in the top right of the screen. Once the email is sent, you'll return to your saved files in the Files app. To finish up, let's look at how to safely delete a file from your iPhone. For our demonstration, we're going to delete the file about gardening, because we don't need it anymore. Tap and hold on the Home Gardening file. A list of options will appear. The Delete option is at the very bottom of this list. It's red, and the icon looks like a small bin. Before you tap it, make sure this is definitely the file that you want to delete. You should only delete files that you have saved onto your iPhone. It's not recommended to delete any other files as it might cause your phone to stop working properly. Tap Delete and the file will be removed from your iPhone.
If you need to access the file again, you'll have to find it from it's original source and save it to the Files app once more. Swipe up from the bottom of the phone to close Files and return to the Home screen. You should now be able to save, open and read files on your iPhone, using the Files app. You should also be able to share and delete files. If you're unsure about any steps you can rewind the video, or click the chapter headings to jump to the start of a chapter. If you're ready to move on, there are many other courses to explore on Be Connected.