Let’s face it, there’s always something in the gallery that we don’t want to be made public or seen by someone who shouldn’t be. It does not have to be a compromised photo or video, it can be something related to our childhood, or one of the many images that we receive daily by WhatsApp. It’s time to know how to hide all that content in the Google Photos gallery .
It is applicable to almost any Android gallery, whether native or not. However, we will focus on showing it from Google Photos, since it is an app also pre-installed on Android devices that is always presenting new features, and therefore is the most widely used by users. Not only do we have one, but there are several methods to hide gallery elements .
Hide photos with nomedia
It is a file extension that, when created in a folder of the explorer, will allow to hide any multimedia file that is added to this folder. In this way, all the photos and all the videos that we select to send to said folder, will not be seen again by the gallery. They will not disappear completely, they can simply be seen from the file explorer .
Unfortunately, the native browser of the smartphone does not contain this support for files in .nomedia format, in addition to the fact that the option to share items from Google Photos to said browser does not usually appear. Therefore, we must resort to an external app, no matter what it is. For the tutorial we have chosen the well-known ES File Explorer , which after installing it, we will directly create a new folder.
We go to the “+” symbol and give the new folder a name. We return to Google Photos to select all the elements that we want to hide, and we share them to the browser that we have installed. Once those images are in the new folder, we are going to click on the “+” sign again, although this time we select “Create new file”. This is where we enter the name of this extension, and it is important that you write correctly, being “.nomedia”, without capital letters or spaces . And voilà, after waiting a few seconds for the folder to be read, that content in the gallery will have disappeared.
What if you want to undo the process?
There is no need to worry that the change made is eternal. If we believe that it is no longer necessary to hide anything, we can always undo it. To do this, we select those hidden images and move them to another folder within the internal storage , either to a new folder or to the one they previously belonged to, or simply by deleting the “.nomedia” file, although it cannot always be done. With that, and after waiting a few seconds, everything that had previously vanished in the gallery will reappear.
Hide photos from Google Photos
Recently Google has implemented a new section to have, in a more reserved way, photos and videos from the gallery itself. This section is called “File”, and is found in the sidebar of the app. However, although the front page elements disappear , they are still in the gallery, but it is an alternative if we do not want to complicate our lives as much as in the previous step.
To do this, we simply select all the elements to hide, a selection that we can make simultaneously with all the amount of images we want. Click on the three points in the upper right corner, and there will be the option “Move File” . If it is only of a specific image, we enter it, slide up, and we will find the same option. To undo the changes, simply follow the same procedure, with the difference that the option will be “Unarchive”.
