If you’re looking to improve data security by hiding files on your PC hard drive, you may have read about ways to encrypt folders or change the attributes on a file so that they cannot be accessed by prying eyes. However, a lot of times hiding files or folders in that way requires that you install some sort of software on your computer, which could then be spotted by someone else.

Below is a way to hide files that is very counter-intuitive and therefore pretty safe! Using a simple trick in Windows that allows you to hide a file inside a picture file!

You can actually hide any type of file inside of an image file, including txt, exe, mp3, avi, or whatever else. Not only that, you can actually store many files inside of single JPG file, not just one! This can come in very handy if you need to hide files and don’t want to bother with encryption and all that other technical stuff.

Hide File in Picture

In order to accomplish this task, you will need to have a zip/compression application like jZIP, 7-Zip or WinRAR installed on your computer. You can easily download either of these off the Internet and use for free. Here are the steps for creating your hidden archive:

• 1. Create a folder on your hard drive, e.g. C:\Test and put in all of the files that you want to hide into that folder. Also, place the image that you will be using to hide the files in.

Filetohide.txt, Document_to_hide2.doc, Photo-to-hide.bmp, Musictohide.mp3, Movietohide.avi and Picture1.jpg

Note that the file names must NOT have spaces. So for example "Filetohide.txt" not "File to hide.txt"

• 2. Now select all of the files that you want to hide, right-click on them, and choose the option to add them to a compressed ZIP or RAR file. Only select the files you want to hide, not the picture. Name it whatever you want, e.g. “Hidden.rar”, “Hidden.zip” or Hidden.7z depending on the compression application you are using.
  
  

• Now you should have a folder that looks something like this with the original files and image, and a compressed archive of the files to be hidden:

Filetohide.txt, Document_to_hide2.doc, Photo-to-hide.bmp, Musictohide.mp3, Movietohide.avi and Hidden.rar

• 3. To hide the new file in the image file, open a command prompt window. Click on Start, and then click on Run. Type in CMD and press Enter. You should now see the command prompt window open. Type in CD \ to get to the root directory. Then type CD and the directory name that you created, i.e. “CD Test“.

• Now type in the following line: copy /b Picture1.jpg + Hidden.rar Picture2.jpg and press Enter.

And that’s it! The picture file will have been updated with the compressed archive inside! You can actually check the file size of the new picture and see that it is the same as the size of the orignal picture plus the archive of hidden files.

To access the hidden files just right-click on the new picture file and choose Open With and look for WinRAR or 7-Zip (depending on which application you used). Either way, you’ll see your hidden files show up that you can then extract from the image.

That is all it takes to hide files inside JPG, PNG and other picture files! Note that you can also increase security of your documents by including a password when creating the compressed file.

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Summarised by the TechSupport team from articles posted on Online Techtips and Instructables .