Thomas Kobelsky's Blog

July 6, 2010

We've all be there before. You get a sweet stash of pictures that you don't want found. Pictures that if the guys knew you had, you'd be made the laughing stock of the group.

You know the kind... the ones with the cute fuzzy kittens and the pretty landscapes. Well have no fear. There is a way to keep them hidden where everyone can see them.

I'm sure everyone knows about the "Hidden Attributes" and all that (right click on a file -> Properties -> Hidden, then change the Folder Options to "Do not show hidden files and folders"), we we're going to take it one step up. We're going to have the files sitting right on the desktop so everyone can see them and play with them.

We're going to hide files inside an image file. No, I'm not crazy.

Grab two images or files that are just sitting around collecting virtual dust.


Right click and Send To -> Compressed Folder


Copy the resulting Zip file and paste it in the C: drive root. Also, take this totally awesome picture of a Quad SLI rig and save it there as well.


You should now have both the Zip file and the totally awesome Quad SLI picture there.


Now this is where it gets tricky. We're going to press the Windows Key (abbreviated to WinKey) and R to open the Run command. The WinKey is usually located in the bottom left corner between Ctrl and Alt, but I know that my Laptop has it up by the Print Screen Button.


Now that the Run command is open, were going to type "cmd" without quotes to open the Command Prompt (a DOS emulator built into the NT kernel).


When the Command Prompt appears, type in "cd\" (without the quotes) which is the command to Change Directory to the root (\). The resulting path will be C:\> which brings back many memories of the way back years.


Now comes the actual part of hiding the Zip file in the image. Type the following without quotes: "copy /b QuadSLI.png + Sunset.zip Awesome.png" and press Enter. Keep in mind that the "QuadSLI.png" can be swapped out for whatever your image's name is, same with the "Sunset.zip" for whatever the compressed file is called. The last name, "Awesome.png," is what the resulting file is going to be called.


You should end up with three files: the original image, the Zip file and the new image with the Zip in it.


You can use this new image file however you would a regular image file, so move it to the desktop. The only downside is that the filesize of the Zip gets added on to the filesize of the image, so you could end up with a 25x25 pixel PNG that's 3.5gbs big.

To access the hidden files, simply right click on the new image and open with an archiving program. I use 7z, but WinRar is also very useful.


Then you can unzip it and gain access to your files again.


When you're done with them, simply delete the unzipped files and keep the image with the hidden files in it.

-tk

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