5 January 2014

Hide Files and Folders in Android Devices

Published at | 1/05/2014 Categories: ,


As everyone has some personal files or folders such as documents, pictures and videos on their Android phone, some users like to hide their private files for privacy reason. There are different and various free and pay application available in the market that can manage your files and folder including hidden them. Today we want to show you how to hide your folders in Android devices by changing their attributes. Some of you may already know that by adding a dot "." In front of any file or folder, the Android OS will hide the corresponding file or folder. Nobody can view the hidden files unless you enable the Show Hidden file option in file manager settings. As you can see, anyone who knows this method can easily access the hidden files by simply activating this option, but still if you do not want to use any third party application you can use this method.

One other method that you can use is to add a .nomedia file to any directory or rename a folder/file name to .nomedia although this trick only prevents files like pictures and videos from loading by the Android Gallery. In result no one will able to view the entire directory through the gallery but they will be available in the file manager except you add a period at the beginning of the folder name. Let check these two methods step by step.

Step 1

Go to your Android device File Manager and navigate to the folder or file that you want to hide it. Select the desired file/folder and add a dot "." in front of its name. Let say I have a PDF file that called Personal, I will simply rename it to ".Personal" and OK the change. Now if I check my folder again the file is hidden. 




 

Step 2

To view any hidden file go to the File Manager Settings and enable the Show hidden files/folders option, this feature displays all files and folders that begin with a don "." or period. If your device file manager does not have this option, you can use the ES File Explorer which is available in the App Store for free.



 

Step 3

To prevent any folder from being scanned by your device media scanner like the Gallery or Music Player, create a blank file in that particular folder and rename it to the .nomedia. To create a blank file or an empty text document, you can use any Android file manager application like ES Files Explorer. Any folder that contains the .nomedia file will not show in the Gallery.






Instead of creating a .nomedia file, you can also rename the folder that contains the images you do not want to loaded by the Gallery to the .nomedia, or inside the folder, rename one of the image names to the .nomedia. All these three methods will do the tricks. You should know that as we are using a period at the beginning of the .nomedia file, Android OS considers it as a hidden file so to see the file, you need to enable the Show hidden files/folders option as well.

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