How To Hide Private Picture Folders From The Gallery [Android]

When you’ve had your Android for a while, the amount of pictures on the phone build up. It’s not just your photos, either. It’s album cover art, pictures lazily stored by applications, and wallpaper. Pretty soon you realise your phone’s Gallery is full of these pictures that slow down the loading time. They probably don’t appeal to you much as pictures to browse in your Gallery anyway. It’s time to get rid of them.

Luckily, there’s a couple of really easy ways to stop folders from being incorporated into your Gallery. Pretty soon those pesky pictures will be hidden away from your sight where they belong.

1. Hiding Folders From Gallery Using Gallery Application

Some types of Android phones have made it easy to remove certain folders from their Gallery by telling the Gallery itself not to load those folders. This can be useful, however the phone will still search for the photos on launching the Gallery, so this step alone doesn’t stop those photos slowing down your Gallery launch.

Hiding the folders from within the application also makes it easy to reveal which folders are hidden in the Gallery. So, if you’ve got some picture folders you’d prefer to keep a secret, you’d best have a go at one of the other methods instead.

2. Prefix Your Folder With A Dot

If the folder has a dot before the name, it will be automatically excluded from the Gallery. Gallery completely overlooks these folders, so it saves you time upon Gallery launch. Essentially, prefixing with the dot turns the folder into a hidden folder, so many applications will be unable to see the folder after the change — this includes some file managers. If you’re sure it’s okay to make the folder hidden, go ahead. If not, there’s another method we’ll go through shortly that you might prefer to use.

To rename your directories, use any decent Android file manager found in the market.

With Astro, a popular file manager, you need to hold the folder and choose “Edit” and “Rename“.

If you want to change the folder name to remove the prefix but you can’t see the folder, try using a different file manager. Or, you can use the Android SDK to view the file system on your computer and do it that way. If you need a guide to set it up, Ryan has detailed how to use the Android SDK in his article on screenshots for Android.

2. Place a .Nomedia File in the Folder

By placing a .nomedia file in a given folder, you’re telling Gallery not to load this folder while it scans your directory.

To create the .nomedia file, simply use a file manager to copy a text document to the folder. Open the file (pressing and holding will offer you a choice of apps to use) and delete the contents. Now rename the file to “.nomedia”.

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