The Files app on iPadOS 26 has had quite a few nice new features this year, and one of them is the ability to better organise and manage your folders. So, at the moment, I’ve got quite a few folders here, and they all look exactly the same. It’s really hard to actually find what I’m looking for sometimes.

Well, now we can customise how our folders look to make them easier to recognise. So, all I’m going to do is long press on any folder I want and then scroll all the way down that menu until I can find Customise Folder and Tags. This will open up a brand-new screen.

And straight away you’ll notice we can pick any symbol to set as our kind of folder artwork. These symbols are quite good — they can represent lots of different things and make it easier to find — but they’re all the same colour as the folder, which I guess reduces their appearance slightly.

However, we can also add any emoji we like to our folders by clicking on Emoji at the bottom here. Then I can simply search whatever I like. So, for this one, it makes sense to find the flag of Denmark, and I can then choose that emoji and it becomes the artwork for the folder.

Let’s do that again on a new folder. So again, I’m going to long press, I’m going to go down to the bottom where it says Customise Folder and Tags, then I’m going back to Emoji, and this time I’ll look for the Finland flag.

But there’s actually something else we can change as well if you really want to make your folders stand out — and that is the colour of the folder itself. Now, this is based on the tags that you assign to your folders, and there are going to be one of seven different colours, one of which is blue. So, I guess six new colours.

All I’m going to do is tap onto the Tags option on that same page where we choose the emoji and the symbols. And then you can see here I can choose any of those colours on the side. That means I can make the folder red. And when I come off of this screen, you can see it updates almost immediately. Let’s go back and try another colour — perhaps purple. And yes, when we press back, it’s now a purple folder again.

And while these colours are really useful — they can differentiate what you’ve got — you can actually go even further if you want to by labelling what each colour means. So, for example, I could go back to the tag screen, and this time I can add a new tag. I’m going to call it International Training, and I can choose a colour from the end here. Unfortunately, we’re still limited to those seven colours. I wish you could pick any colour, but we can’t, I guess at least for the moment.

So, I’m going to choose red for this one. And then when I go to the tag options, I can just choose the regular red, or I can choose International Training if I want to. And that won’t look much different at first, but when we come to group our folders by the tag, it will then group them by those labels we’ve just given.

And there’s one last trick while you’re here. If I press Select on the top menu bar, I can then select multiple folders and I can customise the colour of them all in one go by setting the tag.

So, just like that, we can now customise the Files app — and all these changes sync to your iPhone and your Mac as well.

And this is far, far from the only new thing in iPadOS 26. There are loads more cool tips and tricks I want to share with you to help you make the most of your iPad. So, perhaps you might want to check out my YouTube channel down below and maybe even subscribe while you’re there. That way, you won’t miss anything in the future.

Right, I’ll see you next time.