More often than not, you have some kind of material on our PC or Smartphone that you don't want anyone else to see. Be it a sleazy pic of your girlfriend or some old crappy song by Yo Yo Honey Singh, you don't want these to pop up when you lend your phone to anyone else. This short little guide will help you hide those unwanted stuff without anyone knowing about even their existence! No password, no security app, nothing. No, I won't be using the hide files feature in windows which can be circumvented easily by ticking the option to show hidden files and folders. Read on to know the easiest ever method to hide a file.
How to Hide any File in Android:
- Download any 3rd party File Explorer as most stock file managers don't support what we are going to do. Root Explorer and Astro File Manager are two good options.
- Go to the folder in which your file is present.
- Long press on the file you want to hide.
- Select Rename option and change the extension of the file. For example, if you want to hide a video of .mp4 extension, change the extension (which starts after the last dot in the file name) to .apk or .txt or anything you want to and save the name.
- The file explorer might show you a warning message that the file may not work as intended if you change the extension, ignore the warning and hit continue.
Hide any File in an Android phone - Similarly you can hide any pic by renaming it from .jpg to .apk or whatever crap you can think about. Same applies to any song/ application you want to hide.
- Doing this will hide the file from Gallery, any music or audio player.
- When you want to use the file again rename it back to the old extension.
How to Hide any File in Computer:
- If you're on Windows 7/8, press alt to get the menu bar when you are in the "Computer/My Computer" screen. If you are on Windows XP, the menu bar is already present on the screen.
- Go to Tools > Folder Options.
- In the subsequent window that pops up, go to the "View" tab and find the option that says Hide extensions for known file types. Untick that option and hit OK.
- Go to the folder which contains the file you want to hide. Right Click on that file and select rename. Change the extension of the file as described in Step 4,5 and 6 of the "How to hide any file in Android" guide present above.
- When you rename, the file won't be accessible anymore, unless you rename the file back to its original extension.
Hide any file on a Computer
Tip 1: If you rename any .mp3 file to .wav, i.e. rename an extension from sound to sound type, the file will still work. So, be a bit intelligent in renaming the extension. Changing the extenion of a video file from, say, .mp4 to .3gp will not hide the file from your Gallery/Video Player.
Tip 2: Also pay attention to renaming the file name wisely too, not only extension. For example, if you rename a video from sleazyvideo.mp4 to sleazyvideo.apk, then if someone is smart enough, he will understand that you are tricking the system into not playing the file and might rename the file back to any video extension and get it working again. So changing the file's name to something like cuttherope.apk will make everyone believe that the apk file might have gone corrupt and that's why it's not working as it should. Only if they know that we are fooling them to believe that the video file is an android application.
