Hide files inside of JPEG/GIF images

If you’re looking to hide 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. The another reason to hide files is, if

• You suspect someone's illegally distributing your copyrighted PDF's or images, so you add hidden copyright information in them.
• You want to exchange information like passwords or sensitive images over an insecure transmission protocol, like email.
• You want to embed secret files available only to a select few in a public forum.
• You want to impress your friends and co-workers with your sneaky ways.

Here I’m going to show you a new way to hide files that is little bit tricky but safe. Using a simple trick in Windows. 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/GIF file  and no one can imagine files are hidden inside picture file. 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.

How to hide files inside of image file:

In order to accomplish this task, you will need to have either WinZip or WinRAR installed on your computer. You can download either of these two off the Internet and use them without having to pay anything. Here are the steps for hiding files in image file:

• Create a folder on your hard drive, i.e. 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.

• 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, i.e. “test.rar”. 

• Now you should have a folder that looks something like this with files, a GIF image, and a compressed archive

• Now here’s the real part. Click on Start, and then click on Run. Type in "CMD" without the quotes and press Enter. You should now see the command prompt window open. Type in "CD\" to get to the root directory and then type CD and the directory name that you created, i.e. "CD Test".

• Now type in the following command and press Enter:
  copy /b fp.gif + test.rar hidden.gif
  You should get a response like below

Just make sure that you check the file extension on the compressed file, whether it is .ZIP or .RAR as you have to type out the entire file name with extension in the command. I have heard that some people say that they have had problems doing this with a .ZIP extension, so if that doesn’t work, make sure to compress to a .RAR file.
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 picture and see that it has increased by the same amount as the size of the archive.

How to see files inside of image file
You can access your hidden file in two ways. Firstly, you can just right-click on the GIF image and choose Open With and then scroll down to WinRAR. See following image for reference:

Secondly, simply change the .GIF extension to .RAR using command "rename hidden.gif hidden.rar" without quotes and open the file using WinRAR.

Either way, you’ll see your hidden files show up that you can then extract out.

That’s it! That is all it takes to hide files inside JPG/GIF picture files! It’s a great way simply because not many people know it’s possible and no one even thinks about a picture as having to the ability to “hide” files.

Enjoy and Happy Hiding!


Note: All image file used in this post has hidden file, to check click on image then save image and follow to above steps.