As an Android user, you may know that Gallery scans and displays all the media stored on your device SD card such as camera photos, images, wallpapers, and screenshots. Similar is the case with WhatsApp, one of the most popular IM app whose media such as images and videos are automatically saved and loaded into gallery. Perhaps, if you’re looking to protect your personal WhatsApp data from prying eyes then it can be simply done by preventing WhatsApp media from being shown in your gallery on Android.
This is certainly the most easiest way to hide any specific folder or directory from the gallery. Also, this trick doesn’t requires root nor installing any 3rd party app and you can do it on the device itself provided you’ve a file manager app installed (such as ES File Explorer or Astro File Manager). We prefer the all-in-one ES File Explorer.
1. Navigate to the WhatsApp directory on your phone sdcard using ES Explorer. Open Whatsapp > Media > WhatsApp Images / WhatsApp Video / WhatsApp Audio
2. Tap on the globe icon at top left corner in ES Explorer and then open Settings.
3. Open the Display setting and tick mark the option ‘Show hidden files’.
4. Get back to the WhatsApp Images folder. Now create a new file inside this folder and name it .nomedia (Click + New icon and then select new file)
Similarly, create the .nomedia filein WhatsApp Video folder to hide it from Gallery.
Now open up the gallery and it won’t show your WhatsApp stuff anymore! ?
Alternate Method – It is also possible to make the entire directory hidden. This can be done by adding a “.” before the directory name. For e.g. Rename WhatsApp ‘Media’ folder to .Media and doing so will hide its entire contents in gallery.
To revert back anytime, just delete the .nomedia file from respective folders.
Tip: Stop WhatsApp from automatically downloading images, video, and audio – This can be configured on Android, go to Menu > Settings > Chat settings > Media auto-download. Then un-check the media you don’t prefer to get auto-downloaded.