How To Hide Files Inside An Image

That top secret research you're doing which will save the world. Or that love letter you wrote for the love of your life. Or that stash of photos that are not that decent or umm...shareable with everyone (I mean those adorable childhood pictures your mom took of you getting potty trained when you were a baby. I swear..that's what I was talking about. Honest!). Well we've all got something we wanted to hide from prying eyes at some time of point. And in this age of digitisation, we rely a lot on computers to store all these top secret files for us.

Well this is an old but neat trick to hide files on your PC. It works because most people wouldn't really think of hiding stuff inside an image. 

Now, to hide files 'inside' an image all you need is a software like WinRAR. Other compression softwares like WinZip or 7-Zip also work. I have used WinRAR in the steps I've explained below-

1.Make a new folder and move all the files you want to hide to this folder. In our case, the folder is C:\Tech-gyaan. The files I intend to hide are "File1.doc" & "File2.txt".

Also move the image file that you intend to use to this folder.

2. Now select all the files you want to hide, right click, and select 'Add to Archive'. This option should appear automatically in the context menu after you've installed WinRAR.

In the window that pops up, name the archive anything you want. I've named it TG.rar

3. Next, go to Start-> Run. Type in 'cmd' to open the command prompt. Type in cd.. until you come to the root C: drive. Next, type cd Tech-gyaan or whatever is the name of the folder you've created.

Now type in "copy /b Image.JPG + TG.rar Image.jpg" without quotes & press Enter. [Replace 'TG' & Image with the appropriate name of the respective files on your comp]

You should see a response like the one below saying '1 file(s) copied.'

That's it! You've successfully hidden those files inside the image. It'll look just like a normal image file after this is done.

You'll notice that the size of the JPEG image increases a bit. Now to access those hidden files when you need them, you can right click on the image file, go to 'Open With' and select WinRAR from the list of programs. If WinRAR is not displayed in the list, simply click on 'Choose program' and then scroll down toWinRAR. You should now be able to see your hidden files in WinRAR. You can extract them if you want to.

You could even encrypt or password protect the rar file for better security.

Feel free to contact me in case of any queries or problems.

Photo credit: Rafael Anderson Gonzales Mendoza