How to: Hide gallery images
July 2, 2007 by Dario Soltani
Some of you people have the need to sometimes hide pictures and images from your Symbian device image gallery. There are numerous situations for why one would like to do this. The most obvious one would be hiding application images (like Tom Tom, Papyrus or QuickContacts), that after installation will be displayed in the image gallery. Other reasons would be avoiding the same mistakes some top celebrity’s done in the past, people like Pamela Anderson or Paris Hilton, both known for leaking nude images and videos to the public. That is of course nothing I have any knowledge of but I have received some inquires about hiding pictures from public viewing and these things always gets my imagination roaming free 
Hiding “unwanted” images is a pretty simple procedure involving file attributes, just like in a PC you can make files “hidden”. Here’s what you need to do:
- Download and install Y-browser, a free file browser for Symbian devices available in our software section.
- Note the filename of the image you’d like to hide.
- Open Y-browser and select [options] – [search files].
- Enter your image filename in the filename field followed by “.*”. An example would be “myimage.*”.
- Select [Options] – [Start search].
- Highlight your file in the search result list and select [Options] – [File] – [Attributes].
- Change “System” and “Hidden” to yes and select [Save].
- Repeat this process for all of the images you want to be hidden.
- Exit Y-Browser and restart your phone. It should all work now!
The applications using these images will still be able to access them as normal but you’ll no longer have to view them in your gallery.
hey dario. i’m having trouble with this process. recently i added garmin mobile to my n95 8gb. i have y-browser and i’m trying to hide the images that show up in my gallery from garmin. when i search the file and click ‘options’ – ‘file’ – ‘attributes’, change ’system’ and ‘hidden’ to “yes”, i do not get the option to save. there is no button for the left soft key, and the right soft key remains ‘back’. any ideas?
sounds very odd, I have the save button, but Im not sure if the hide attribute will hide your image from garmin (garmin could be configured to show hidden files aswell). Anyway you should have the save button so try to reinstall the y-browser application or use another file browser with attribute settings.
is it possible to hide media from gallery using Y ?
i found another very quick and easy method. Use Nokia maps once and it will create a folder in the memory card will be ceated – cities\diskcache. Within this folder, there will be sevral folders 1, 2, 3 – select any folder and any sub-folder within that. Put your media files here and it wont be visible in the Gallry. Just make sure you remeber the path to access the files when you need.
Awesome trick Alok…..Thanks for the info