In order to accomplish this task, you will need to have either WinZip or WinRAR installed on your computer. You can download either of these two off the Internet and use them without having to pay anything. Here are the steps for creating your hidden stash:
  • Create a folder on your hard drive, i.e. C:\Test and put in all of the files that you want to hide into that folder. Also, place the image that you will be using to hide the files in.
hide file in jpg
  • Now select all of the files that you want to hide, right-click on them, and choose the option to add them to acompressed ZIP or RAR file. Only select the files you want to hide, not the picture. Name it whatever you want, i,e. “Hidden.rar”.
add to archive
  • Now you should have a folder that looks something like this with files, a JPG image, and a compressed archive:
hidden rar
  • Now here’s the fun part! Click on Start, and then click on Run. Type in “CMD” without the quotes and pressEnter. You should now see the command prompt window open. Type in “CD \” to get to the root directory. Then type CD and the directory name that you created, i.e. “CD Test“.
cd test
  • Now type in the following line: “copy /b DSC06578.JPG + Hidden.rar DSC06578.jpg” and press Enter. Do not use the quotes. You should get a response like below:
hide files in jpg
Just make sure that you check the file extension on the compressed file, whether it is .ZIP or .RAR as you have to type out the entire file name with extension in the command. I have heard that some people say that they have had problems doing this with a .ZIP extension, so if that doesn’t work, make sure to compress to a .RAR file.
And that’s it! The picture file will have been updated with the compressed archive inside! You can actually check the file size of the picture and see that it has increased by the same amount as the size of the archive.
You can access your hidden file in two ways. Firstly, simply change the extension to .RAR and open the file using WinRAR. Secondly, you can just right-click on the JPG image and choose Open With and then scroll down to WinRAR. Either way, you’ll see your hidden files show up that you can then extract out.
winrar
That’s it! That is all it takes to hide files inside JPG picture files! It’s a great way simply because not many people know it’s possible and no one even thinks about a picture as having to the ability to “hide” files. Enjoy!