Want to hide files without third-party apps? Try this trick
These days, handing over your phone to someone, even for a short while, can be extremely scary. They may toy around with your device and end up opening photos/videos or accessing files you don't want others to see. Normally, such an invasion is avoided with annoying file-hiding apps, but there's another simpler trick to hide as many files as you want. Here's how.
Why avoid third-party file hiders?
On Android, you can find a number of apps dedicated to hiding files and folders. Most of these apps would serve the purpose, but then, they would take unnecessary space on your device and make it more cluttered. More importantly, such apps may also serve you targeted ads, which would come up every time you try to hide or unhide a file.
However, you can hide files on your own
To avoid the mess of such apps, you can hide files from your phone by simply creating a hidden folder. It will act as a system folder, which means the Android operating system won't ever look inside it to update the content of apps like Gallery. It means, any file, from photos and videos to documents, stored in this folder will stay hidden indefinitely.
So, how to create this hidden folder?
Any Android user can create a hidden folder by heading over to the file manager of their phone and creating a folder with any random name starting with a period (.). But, do note that you'll have to enable viewing of hidden files from the settings of the file manager to access this folder and add files into it.
This is what the whole process would look like
Put simply, the whole process would be something like: enable viewing of hidden files, create a folder with a dot, and add files into it. Once that's done, disable the setting, so that nobody but you are able to access the hidden files.
