Instead, let’s begin with the macOS Photos app, which has the functionality to “hide” photos, although it has a very different idea of what “hidden” truly means. When you select photos, simply right click and choose to hide them. Now they will not appear in your photo stream. The app is not truly locked in the Locker app it’s just put in the folder on the second page semi hidden in the background. This is ridiculous! After researching my understanding is there are NO apps that can truly password protect an app and hide that app within, which is fine but don’t advertise that an app will because it won’t. Change the Mac App Icons on the Desktop. By default, Mac displays all the icons on the desktop in a certain way, which would vary among different macOS versions.
When you need to share your computer with others, you must feel embarrassed if they see your pictures or private images intentionally or not. Then what you should do is certainly to hide or lock your pictures/private images for your privacy.
Next, in this article, we will introduce you 3 practical methods to help you hide these private pictures or images on the computer. The first method is using a third-party software to hide pictures while the other two are using Windows built-in tools. And for your convenience, in every part of the solutions we will also show you how to unhide pictures or images on Windows 10/8/7. If you prefer to lock photos with password, you can refer to an article having been written previously.
![How to hide photos app on mac os How to hide photos app on mac os](/uploads/1/3/4/1/134154286/161641140.jpg)
Method 1 – How to Hide Pictures on Computer Using Gihosoft File Encryption
This free download. software Gihosoft File Encryption helps you easily protect pictures and private images by disguising them as any icon of the computer, hiding the real pictures under the illusion of other icons. Compared to password protecting image files, this feature is much more user-friendly for those who are easy to confuse several passwords or are troubled by multiple passwords forgetting.
Not only can this software serve as a picture hider for PC, but it also helps you with other things, such as password protecting folders, and encrypting files on Windows 10/8/7.
Now let me show you how to hide private pictures or images on the computer with this picture hider for PC. You can follow these steps below:
- Open this image hider software, and you need to enter a master password to make sure next you can normally use its functions.
- Click on the Folder Masquerade option on the left panel. Then you will see the Select Items option, click on it to navigate to the folder you need to hide. Or you can directly drag and drop the folder onto this page to get it hidden.
- Then there will pop up an icon box. Just choose one as the hidden icon for the folder and click on the Create option. After that, if you can see this hidden folder listed under Items, it means you are done hiding the pictures.
Tip: Whenever you need to unhide that image folder, just select it and click on the Disguise off option. Then you can see a prompt box saying Please wait 1 or 2 minutes for the folder to restore to its original status, and click on OK.
Having already known this software, why not download it and experience its free trial version? You can experience the folder hiding feature before purchase because the free version enables you to hide 3 folders for free. To enjoy more features and better service, you can upgrade to the pro version.
Method 2 – How to Hide Images on PC Using File Explorer?
It’s the second way to make your private images hidden in Windows 10/8/7. The main steps are stated as follows:
- Open the File Explorer and navigate to the image you want to hide.
- Right-click the item and click on Properties.
- On the General tab, under Attributes, check the Hidden option and click on Apply.
- Attention! If you’re hiding a folder with pictures and subfolders, make sure to select the Apply changes to this folder, subfolders, and files option. And click OK.
- Click OK again to complete the task.
After this process, you will definitely need to access these hidden pictures later, so we will tell you how to unhide pictures in Windows 10/8/7 next.
- Option 1 – You’ll have to type the complete path to the hidden picture or folder you want to access and press Enter. For example: C:UsersadminDesktopFilesSecret FilesGreat Secret.txt.
- Option 2 – You can open File Explorer, click on the View tab and make sure to check the Hidden items option. Then you can browse your hidden pictures as you would normally do with other files.
Method 3 – How to Hide Private Images on Computer Using Command Prompt
Alternatively, you can also make pictures hidden in Windows by Command Prompt. Here are the steps you can follow:
- Open Start, search for Command Prompt and click the result.
- Type the following command to navigate to the pictures you want to hide and then press Enter:
cd C:UsersadminDesktopFiles
In the command replace the path after cd with the path to your picture or folder. - Type the following command to hide a picture or folder and then press Enter:
attrib +h “Secret Files”
In the command replace “Secret Files” with the name of your picture or folder. Please note that quotation marks are only necessary when there are spaces in the name.
And if you need to hide a folder with pictures and subfolders, you can refer to the following steps:
- In the Command Prompt type the following command to navigate inside the hidden folder and press Enter:
cd “Secret Files”
In the command replace “Secret Files” with the name of your hidden folder. - Type the following command to hide all pictures and subfolders inside the hidden folder and then press Enter:
attrib +h /s /d
If you need to unhide your pictures or folders, you can follow the steps mentioned above in Method 3, but what you should pay attention to is that you need to enter attrib -h “Secret Files” in step 3 of the first part of Method 3 and enter attrib -h /s /d in step 2 of the second part of Method 3.
Hope these 3 ways to hide private pictures on computer will help you a lot in protecting your images, and if you have any question, welcome to leave your messages in the comment box below!
How To Hide Photos App On Mac Computer
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Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.If you use the Photos app to view pictures stored on your Windows 10 computer, you probably have noticed that normally it displays all pictures it can find on the PC. What if you don't want some of the pictures to be visible in the Photos app? This article will explain how to do that.
The most important thing to understand about how the Photos app finds the pictures to display is that it does NOT look for the image files stored on the hard drive directly. Instead, it uses information from the Windows search index: if it finds information about an image file in the search index, it uses it to display the image. So in order to prevent an image from appearing in the Photos app, we need to find a way to remove information about that image file from the search index.
Windows 10 offers just a tool for that: from the Start menu, open Settings, and there select Searching Windows. You should get to the screen that lets you control the folders that Windows search includes or excludes in its index. The amount of control that you have depends on the type of your user account: some features are only available to the administrators, and not to the standard users. Regardless, you should be able to open the Advanced Search Indexer Settings:
Update Photos App On Mac
Opening the Advanced Search Indexer Settings
Another thing to understand about Windows search index that you cannot exclude individual files from it, you can only exclude folders. If you tell Windows to exclude a certain folder from indexing, then all files in that folder will be excluded. So, unless you have already done so, you should first create a folder for the image files that you want to be hidden from the Photos app, move the images files you want to be hidden in that folder, and then tell Windows to exclude that specific folder from its index.
For example, suppose, for whatever reason, you don't want the pictures of your cats to appear in Photos app. Open File Explorer, navigate to the Pictures folder, and create a new folder there with the appropriate name (Cats in our example). Move the image files of the cats into that folder (drag-and-drop should work just fine for that). Use the Folders link of the Photos app to navigate to the Cats folder to check that the images you want to hide are actually there:
Now return to the Indexing Option screen we've discussed above and press the Modify button. When the Indexed Locations screen opens (see below), navigate to the folder you want to exclude (do not use the check boxes for that, use the little arrows to expand and collapse folders as needed.) For a folder in your Pictures folder, expand Local drive C:, then Users, then locate your user name and expand that folder, and finally expand Pictures. The folder we want to exclude from the index (named Cats in our example) should appear there. Now clear the check box next to the Cats folder, and that will tell Windows to exclude it from the search index (only the folders that have the check marks next to them are indexed.)
Press OK to close the screens you've opened and ... wait. Yet another thing to know about Windows search index is that it's picky about getting itself updated. Oftentimes, when Windows detects that you are actively using your computer, it delays the updates to its search index until your activity stops or slows down. Other times it may update the index almost immediately after you make changes to it. If you are an administrator of the computer, you can try to force Windows to rebuild the search index: on the Indexing Options screen, press Advanced, and then use the Rebuild button:
However, even forcing to rebuild the index sometimes does not make it happen soon enough. If you've waited a few minutes and nothing seems to change in the Photos app, try restarting the computer and check the Photos after that. Eventually, Windows index should catch up with the changes you've made, and the Photos app should stop displaying the images from the excluded folder. If it does not, consider moving the Cats folder out of the Pictures area altogether. For example, create a Cats folder in the root of the C: drive, and move the pictures there. This should force Photos app to refresh and remove the images from the view.
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That's nice, you might say, but what about other apps and File Explorer itself? Even if the images are not visible in the Photos app, anyone could still navigate to the Cats folder with File Explorer and see the images there. If you want to prevent that, excluding the folder from the search index is not enough, you need to protect access to the folder in some other way. Of course, we would be fools not to take this opportunity and suggest that our software Folder Guard was designed for just such a task! You could use it to add a password to the Cats folder, and any time someone would want to look into it with File Explorer, they would need to enter that password first. Check it out!