Need to send a secret message? (If you’re a terrorist, please stop reading now.) It’s actually very easy to hide a file of a different format inside a standard JPEG image. According to TrickSystem.com, you can do this with .pdfs, Office docs, HTML web pages, video clips, zipped files, mp3s or most any other format. And there’s nothing illegal involved!
The “trick” is to convert your file into a JPEG so that if anyone outside your secret club simply double-clicks the file name or thumbnail to open it, they’ll just see a preview of the image. Your message’s intended recipient will know to rename the extension from .jpg back to whatever file format you started with.
To do this, follow these steps:
1. Start with two files – the one you want to hide (let’s call it secretfile.pdf) and another that’s a JPEG image (let’s call it dummyimage.jpg) of any size or dimensions.
2. Copy both files to your C: hard drive and open the command prompt window.
3. Type cd to make sure you are in the C: root directory.
4. Now type the following:
copy /b dummyimage.jpg + secretfile.pdf the_new_image.jpg
5. Send your file named the_new_image.jpg to your recipient. For them to recover your original pdf file, they just need to rename the_new_image.jpg to secretfile.pdf (or give it their own name with the .pdf extension).
Some file formats may need to be compressed or zipped before you run the copy command.
