Privacy and security are important to us, so we all want to hide some files on our Android device – whatever it is, we don’t want anyone else to share or see them.
To hide files on Android, most of us install File Hide or File Lock app from Google Play. But sometimes, if you don’t want some apps to take up extra space on your device, here’s a simple trick to hide files on Android without using any apps.
Hide files on Android without using any apps:
Method 1 :
1. First open your file manager and then create a new folder. Now move all the files you want to hide into that folder.
2. Then go to your file manager settings. Also enable “Show hidden files/folders” option.
3. Now rename the newly created folder which contains the files you want to hide. Add a dot “” when renaming. before all characters.and save it. For example, if your folder name is “My Folder”, rename it to “.My Folder”.
4. Now go back to your file manager settings and set “Hide hidden folders” or disable the option we activated in “Step 2”.
5. Yes, now your folder is hidden, check your gallery. If you want to hide the files, enable “Show hidden files/folders” option, then remove the “” dot and rename the folder.
Method 2 :
Because the above method doesn’t work on some new Android smart phones especially with KitKat and later. Then try Method 2. This method is nothing more than adding the “.nomedia” file to the folder where we hide the files. So the folder containing the “.nomedia” file will be hidden from the gallery. Now what is a “nomedia” file? — “nomedia” file is a file with “.nomedia” extension, video files have “.3gp”, “.mp4” or “.mkv” extension.
1. In the same way as above, move the files you want to hide to the newly created folder in the file manager. This time move a useless picture along with them.
2. In this step we are going to create our “nomedia” file. Now rename your unwanted file to “.nomedia”.
Don’t forget to erase the full name with the extension. And save it. Now the file manager will ask permission to change the file extension, then press “OK”. See the example below. My junk file is “blaa file.jpg”, then I renamed it to “.nomedia”.
3. And go and check your files are successfully hidden from gallery. If the files are still there, reboot your device. If you want to hide your files, rename the “.nomedia” file to some other file extension or delete the file
So that’s it. These are two easy ways to hide files on Android without using any app. If you face any problem or know some other method to hide files then come to the comment section.