How To Hide Files Inside Of Images

Posted on 07. May, 2009 by Shawn Ramsey in Featured, Misc

Ever had some personal files that you would just like to keep well, personal. The following tutorial will teach you how to hide files, whether they are images, videos, word files, bank info or any file type inside of a regular unsuspecting image. The picture appears completely normal and opens in your default photo viewer just as any other image does. The only software you need is any type of compression software. I recommend WinRAR and am using it in the screen shots. I did the best I could to explain these somewhat complicated steps, feel free to ask questions in comments if you’re unsure of anything. Let’s get started.

How To Hide Files Inside Of Images

1. Place a picture that you would like to use to hide files inside of, onto your desktop. Also place the files you want to hide (word documents, pictures, video, bank info…) onto your desktop as well.

2. Highlight the personal files and the picture at the same time. Multiple files can be selected simultaneously by holding down the CTRL key and clicking once on each icon. After highlighting the picture and files, right click and select CUT.

3. Now click Start and go to the Computer in Vista or My Computer in XP. Double Click on the Local Disk (C:) also called the OS (C:)

Here is what the OS (C:) drive looks like visually in Vista.

4. Create a New Folder with in the (C:) drive and make sure and name it a single word without capital letters. Call it “secret” for now. Paste the picture and personal files into this folder.

5. Highlight each personal file (within the Secret Folder) simultaneously and right-click to select “Add to archive…”. Click OK in the following window to compress the files into a .rar file called secret.rar. Do not highlight the image. The new secret.rar compressed file will be located in the “Secret Folder”

6. Now click Start>Run or cmd.exe (if you can’t find this in Vista then do a search for it in the start menu). Type “cmd” to open the command prompt in XP. The window should look like this.

7. Now type “cd c:\secret” and press enter to open the Secret Folder you made earlier. This is not opening the secret.rar file

8. Type “copy b/ mowing.jpg + secret.rar picture.jpg” (without quotes). Replace mowing.jpg with the name of your picture (make sure you named your .rar file secret.rar if you are following exact steps). If you’re wondering why I placed the word “picture.jpg” after the two files, it is because this will be the name of your new picture that hides the chosen files. Hit Enter.

9. The cmd window should say “1 file(s) copied”. Now take a look in your Secret Folder in windows where a new file called picture.jpg has been created. This file (picture.jpg) when double clicked on acts as any picture would and opens in your default photo viewer. But, secretly it contains the files that you hid inside of it.

Want to know how to retrieve and view those hidden files?

1. Open the program WinRAR from the Start menu. Choose File>Open Archive from the drop down menu. Inside of the window that just opened, navigate to the secret folder which is located in My Computer>OS (C:)>secret. Immediately you will notice that you do not see the picture.jpg file that contains the hidden files.

2. To reveal the image picture.jpg, click the drop down menu and select “All Files”

You can now see all of the files in the folder, including the picture.jpg.

3. Finally, double click the picture.jpg file to open up and reveal the compressed personal files hidden inside of the picture.