Saturday, December 8, 2007

How To Hide Certain Pictures or Videos From Gallery in Nseries devices

Some programs (TomTom for example) have image files as part of their installation. The N95 (and other Nseries devices for that matter) indexes all folders and shows the images in the gallery so you can end up with annoying thumbnails/icons/bits of map etc in your gallery.
You may also want to keep some 'private' content out of the gallery so nosey friends don't see them. Here is a guide of how to do it:

1) Download Y-Browser or ActiveFile.  Both are free file managers which are very small but incredibly useful.

2) Install it and then run it.

3) Navigate to wherever the image/video files are. You may need to dig around if the images are from an application but there is a search function so that may help.

4) For each file, highlight it and press the options key. Go to File > Attributes and change 'Hidden' to 'Yes'. Save the changes and exit.

*Repeat this for each file you want to hide.*

5) There will be a folder called _PAlbTN in the same path as the image. Delete it.

6) That's it. You can now only view those hidden files through Y-Browser/ActiveFile or by hooking the phone up to your PC.

NOTE: The _PAlbTN folder contains 3 different sized copies of the image and is created by, and for, the gallery app when it indexes your phone. There will be one _PAlbTN subfolder in every folder in which a picture or video exists. If you delete it the gallery will rebuild it next time it runs from all (visible) images and videos in that folder. That means even if you only want to hide some images in a given location it is still perfectly safe, and much quicker to delete the whole _PAlbTN.

Enjoy!

4 comments:

Unknown said...

it is not working.. after i have done what you have posted i can still open my images and videos even if it is hidden..and i already deleted the _palbtn foder.even if the file is hidden it can be seen in the IMAGES and VIDEOS in the GALLERY..

Zi said...

Hi, AFAIK many people have used this method and they have all suceeded. Perhaps you might want to give your phone a reboot? The gallery need to reload before you see the pictures gone. Cheers mate!

Anonymous said...

yea it works. sorry for the delay

Anonymous said...

yea it works. sorry for the delay