Add Folders to your Home Screen on the iPad

Learn how to add folders from your iPad to the Home Screen through the Files Widget

Learn how to add folders from your iPad to the Home Screen through the Files Widget. When you add the Files widget to your Home Screen, you can select which folder is shows. You can even add more than one Files widget to access multiple folders! See how to access your folders on your iPad’s Home Screen in this video.

Video TranscriptIn this video, I’m going to show you how you can easily access different folders from your Files app, right from your Home Screen. It’s almost like we’re adding a Finder window to our Home Screen on the iPad. We do this through the Files widget. Let’s see what I mean. Let’s go to my iPad.

So I’m looking at my iPad here, and if you notice I have a widget. With iPadOS 15, Apple introduced widgets on the Home Screen. Now with these widgets, we have a new option available to us. We can place the Files widget on our iPad, and then we can access all of the files from a specific folder right from our iPadOS Home Screen. I’m going to swipe up. This as a stack, so it’s a number of different widgets stacked on top of each other. When I swipe up, you’re going to see all of my different files here.

Right now I’m looking at my recent items from the Files app. So the last thing that I opened up was my table and charts from my Numbers app. Before that I had my Dan’s Daily Update open.

To open them up, all I have to do is just tap on it. So let’s go ahead and tap on table and chart. We can see it opens up in the Numbers app. Let’s go back to my Home Screen. I tap on the Home button, and we’re back at my Home Screen.

Now, right now this is looking at all of my recent files. We can also have a Show a Specific Folder. When I swipe up, you’re going to see I have two files here. This is my Downloads folder. So now anytime I download something to my iPad, I can easily find it in this widget here. So again, it’s almost like we’re adding Finder window straight to our iPad.

So how did I do this? Well, let’s swipe over to a new Home Screen and we’re going to start over. We’re just going to recreate this. So I swipe over now. What I need to do is I need to add a new widget. So how do I do that? Well, we just tap and hold on any one of the app icons and it goes into the jiggly mode, and then what we do is we tap on plus.

When I tap on plus I’m able to add my widgets and you can see we have a number of different widgets here. The widgets that I want are from the Files app. So now I tap on Files and you can see we have a number of different styles here. So let’s just go with this large widget here. I tap on Add, and it just added that to my Home Screen.

Now, by default it’s going to show your Recent Items. So I’m going to tap to close this year. Right now, it is showing my Recent Files. What we can do is we can create multiple instances of a widget. So now what I’m able to do is another Files app widget in here and pointed to a different folder. I can even change where this folder is pointed to do that. We have to go back into that jiggly mode. So I tap and hold on any one of the icons. We can see it as jiggling. Let’s go and tap on the plus. Again, we go back over to my files, I swipe over. We have to choose the same size. So I have to go to this larger widget again. And now I just tap on Add Widget.

So now we have two widgets here. What I do now is I drag one on top of the other. This is going to create a stack. So I take this and I drag it on top of the other one. And now that is a stack. I could keep doing this. I could add more widgets from the Files app. So now both of these widgets are pointing at my recents. I swipe back and forth. It’s going to show the same thing because they’re both pointed at my Recent Files.

The next thing I need to do is change where they are pointing to. So how do we do that? Well, we have to edit the widget. So now all I do is just tap and hold on this. We have a menu that pops up. And from here I select Edit Files. I don’t want to edit the stack. I do not want to edit the Home Screen. I want to Edit Files. So it’s going to edit that Files widget, I tap on it. And now all I have to do is just choose a new location. Again, by default it’s set to Recents. So let’s go and point this at my Downloads folder. I tap on Add, we go over to Download. And now when I close this.

We can see it as pointing at my Downloads folder. I swipe, I’m looking at my Recents. Let’s go and add one more folder in here. Again, we tap and hold to we get to our jiggly mode because we’re going to add a new widget. So I tap on the plus. We go over to our Files. I swipe over again. I have to choose the same size and this time what I’m going to do is I’m just going to drag this on top of that other widget. So I just take this widget here and I drag it and I place it on top of the other one. It just added another widget there.

So now I have three Files widgets on that home screen. Now I need to edit it. How do we edit it? Well the first thing we need to do is we need to. So I tap outside anywhere and now it is no longer jiggling. Now what I need to do is tap and hold on the Files widget. We have a menu that pops up. I choose Edit files. And then from here I select where I want it to point to. So I tap on Recent. We’re going to go to shared, and now we can say I have one file in my shared folder. I swiped it, I’m looking at my downloads. Swiped down again, I’m looking at my recents.

If you have iCloud Drive connected to your iPad, you can choose from any one of the folders in iCloud Drive. Maybe you need to access your Desktop folder from your Mac. You want to have easy access to it. All you have to do is just add the files widget to your home. Tap and hold on that Files widget to edit it and then point it over to Desktop from iCloud. Once you do that, all of the files from your Desktop are also going to show in this widget on your Home Screen on the iPad.

So that’s how you can easily access different files and folders on your iPad. You can do this through the Files widget. Just add the widget, and then once you add it, if you edit that widget, you can point it to a specific folder.

So that’s how you add files and folders to your Home Screen through the Files widget on the iPad.