How to Hide Your Files behind a Photo

Yes you read that right. Remember the sci-fi movies of old times; files could be secretly transported using images as their pretense. You might be surprised to know that Windows has a built-in provision for hiding files behind images.  What would be passed along as a photo (and it will remain a photo, you can double click and view it), a file can be merged into it that has a special way of opening it. The process requires just a couple of minutes and then opening the files requires next to none if you know the trick. So let’s get started.

First of all choose a folder where you want to keep the file and the image (you can make a new folder to first try out the trick). We call the file to be hidden as theSource. Put this file to be copied next to the image files. The image files can be in JPG format or PNG. For experimenting you can try different image files but the above two formats are tried, tested and commonly used.

For the files to be encoded on to the image, they need to be put into a Zip file or a WinRaR archive. If you have WinZip or WinRaR installed on your computer, right click on the file and you will see an option to make a .rar file out of it. As soon as you have the .zip/.rar file you are ready.

Now let’s write some code. Open the command prompt (In search bar in Start Menu type cmd and hit Enter). Inside the command prompt you need to write the commands in the directory where the files reside. Here we have made a folder named images in E:\ drive and copied the source file and the image.

To change the directory, type CD /D [Drive:]/[folder]. Like to get to images folder we type CD /D E:/images, the directory is changed to E:/images. If the location of the directory is long you can copy it and paste using right click in the Command prompt window (ctrl + V won’t work)

Now type copy /b [imagename].jpg + [source].rar [imagename].jpg and hit enter. It will look something like this below.

If the file is successfully copied, you will also notice that the size of the image has increased by the same amount as the source file size. Double click on the file and the image will open. The thumbnail too remains the same.

(Note: If you get an error while opening the source file from the converted JPG file, use a new picture>change its extension to .png and try again)

Opening the file is just as simple. You can right click on the image file and select open with>WinRaR archiver (you can also change the image file extension but it might no longer show the image thumbnail). Then you can extract the file and use it. Nobody would know that the photo they are looking at could have a .rar file hidden beneath it.