Select which App to open a Document With on the iPad

In this video, we’re going to look at how we can select which app we want to open a document with on the iPad. Let’s say you have an image or a movie. What you would like to do is open that up in another app, as opposed to the photos app. How do we do that? Well, let’s find out, let’s go to my iPad.

So I have some images in my files app. I’m going to go down. My files app here. And when we open it up, I’m looking at my iCloud Drive. When I opened this up, you’re going to see that I have here a movie. Now, when I open this movie up, what it’s going to do is just open this up in the iPad. So let’s go ahead and click. And we can see it, open it up.

If I want to play this, I just tap on the play button here. But what I would like to do is open this up in another app. I have a third party app VLC installed on my iPad. I want to open up this movie in VLC. How do I do that? Well, all we need to do is just go to our share icon. So when I go to the upper right hand corner, you’re going to see that.

My share icon here. When I click on this, what I’m able to do is open this up or select which app I want to open it up in, including VLC. So all I have to do is just click on this and it’ll open up in VLC. We can open it up in any one of these apps here. So if I wanted to open this up and I movie, I couldn’t do that as well.

I can also select which apps to open it up and down below. You may see a list of apps down here where you can open it up in, let’s go to an image file. So what I’m going to do is tap on done here in the upper left hand corner. And now we’re going to go to an image file here. So I have this image here. I click on it to open it up.

I go over to my share icon in the upper right-hand corner. And. What I’m able to do is select which app I want to open it up in, but also you’re going to see down at the bottom. I do have Photoshop express installed on my iPad. I can also open this up in Photoshop express. So in addition to finding the different apps up here, we can also find them in the lists down here.

Now you can also do this from within an app. Let’s go over to my photos app. So I’m going to swipe up here and let’s open up my photos app. I want to open up this photo here in Photoshop express. How do I do that? Well, all we have to do is go to the share icon again. So I go up to the upper right-hand corner.

I have the share icon here. I select. And then you’re going to see all of the different apps. I can open it up in including Photoshop express. Now, unfortunately we cannot tell a document to open up in a specific app by default. On the Mac. What we can do is we can tell our Mac to always open up this type of document in a specific app.

We can’t do that on the iPad, but we can do it on a file by file basis. All we have to do is just open up the document to where we can see the share icon. When you see the share icon, tap on that and share it with the app. You want to open it up. Depending on which type of document you have open, you may see different options available to you.

So if it’s an image, you may see Photoshop express. If you have Photoshop express open, if it’s an Excel spreadsheet, you may see Excel as opposed to numbers. So your options will change depending on what type of document you have. So that’s how we set what we want to open up a document with on the iPad.