Hide Files and Folders on Android devices – Guide

No matter how possessive you are about your phone but there are people whom you can’t refuse to give your smart device. There will be some folders that you want to hide from such users but it’s not straightforward to do on android platform. Every PC user knows how to hide a folder in Windows but, when it comes to Android, which is based on Linux, users are clueless on how to hide files and folders. There are several apps in the Play store that allows you to hide files and folders on Android, but why give your phone another app load, when the job of hiding files can be easily using a file manager app only. ES File Explorer app is a highly recommended app but you may go ahead with any file manager app of your choice. The procedure for hiding files and folders on android is given below.

Hide folder by adding a dot to the folder name

Note – Don’t use this method for hiding folders that are actively used by apps installed on your phone like, this is useless for hiding images from Whatsapp or files from Downloads folder. If your purpose is hiding files, not folders, use the next method instead. The best use of this method is to collect all the files that you want to hide, place them in one folder and then rename the folder with a dot before folder’s name.

In Android, the apps save caches and some other files by naming it with a dot in front of the folder name. (e.g. .movies). The files inside this folder are not accessible from normal apps like Gallery, Video player, etc. It is accessible for file manager apps and other special apps only. So to do this the steps are given below.

Step 1- Enable hidden files from Settings> Display Settings

Step 2 – Select the folder you want to hide.

Step 3 – Rename the folder by adding a dot before the folder name. 

Now the folder you want to hide will be hidden from other user apps such as Gallery, MX Player, etc. And to view it, you’ll have to use ES File Explorer or any other file manager app that lets you to view hidden files and folders.

Hide files inside folder using ‘.nomedia’ file

Android OS uses one more method to make files inside a folder invisible to other apps by creating a special file named .no media inside a folder. This can also be used to hide files inside a folder. For this follow the below steps:

Step 1- Open the folder from which you want to hide files from

Step 2 – Create a .nomedia file inside the folder using a file manager app

This is all what you have to do and now the files inside the folder will be hidden from apps like Gallery and other apps that list media items.

These are the steps by which you can hide files and folders on your android device and maintain its privacy irrelevant of how many people use it.