If you’re someone that uses the Files app, you’ve probably found it quite tricky to find what you’re looking for sometimes. Well, in iOS 26 and iPadOS 26, there are some new options to organise your folders and your files.

For example, you can now change the colour of any of your folders — check out the video linked above for that one — but in this one, we’re going to have a look at how we can group and how we can view our files using a new list view, which is very much like how it is on the Mac.

So, to get started, let’s try and organise some of the chaos of this folder. I’m going to tap on the icon view in the top corner and then go on to View Options. From here, we’re going to look at the Grouping option. And if I tap onto Group, I can then choose to arrange all of my files and folders by the date they were created or by their name. But I quite like doing it by Kind.

That means it will group all of your Keynote presentations together, all of your images together, all of your folders together — and just like that, you can see it’s now a little bit easier to navigate because I can immediately jump to what I’m looking for.

We can also change how large or small these icons appear. So, we’re going to go onto Icon and List Size, and at the moment it’s on Default. But if we change it to Compact, you’re going to see a lot more on the screen. It’s doing this because it’s not showing the information under the folder, like how many items there are and who created it — all that sort of stuff. I quite like seeing that, so I’m going to go back to Default mode, but it’s good to know that option is there.

Now, there’s something brand new in iPadOS 26 — and that is the ability to use List View rather than just looking at icons. So, I’m going to tap on the icon button in the top corner again, and now we can choose List.

From here, you might be thinking, “Hang on, Jacob, this was here last year. This isn’t brand new.” But actually, we can customise this — we can make those columns bigger or smaller to fit more on the screen. Look, I can literally click and drag here and change the size of that column.

We can even customise what columns we have on this list view. I’ll tap on the three dots — the More button on the top right-hand side — and then I can choose to enable, perhaps, the Size of that folder or file. Now I can see at a glance how many items are in a folder and how large a file is. Let’s go there one more time and we’ll add the iCloud status as well.

Then I can resize any of these columns to make them fit on the screen as I want them to. And of course, I can tap on the column name to sort by that column. When I’m happy with this new list view, if I jump between folders — if I open a new folder or go back a level — it’s going to remember that view for me until I go back and choose Icon mode or Column mode.

So this is a really nice feature in the Files app on iPadOS 26 that makes it that little bit easier to organise what you’re doing. But as I said, there are lots of new things in Files and indeed iPadOS in general. So, check out my channel down below and I’ll show you how you can add folders to the dock on the iPad for the first time. And make sure you subscribe for loads more iPad QuickTips.