How to Hide Images in a PNG
People have been sending secret messages to one another for thousands of years. One method for passing secrets is to hide the messages in plain sight. This is known as steganography, or the process of hiding information within another medium. With the advent of computers and digital imagery came digital steganography, which is the practice of hiding messages and pictures within seemingly innocent digital files, particularly digital images. While there are various software utilities that can hide an image in a PNG image, you can also use the Windows command prompt to hide images.
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Instructions
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Open the "Start" menu and type "cmd" in the search bar.
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Click the "cmd.exe" option that appears in the search results to open a command prompt window.
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Type "cd C:\<folder>" at the command prompt, replacing "<folder>" with the name of the folder containing your PNG image and the image you want to hide. Press "Enter."
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Type "copy /b myimage.png + hideimage.jpg hiddenimage.png" at the command prompt, replacing "myimage.png" with the file name of your original PNG image, "hideimage.jpg," with the file name and extension of the image you want to hide and "hiddenimage.png" with the file name of the new file. Press "Enter."
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Tips & Warnings
To extract the hidden image from your PNG image, you must have an archiving program such as WinZip or Winrar installed on your computer. Right-click on the file, click "Open With" and click "WinZip" or "Winrar." The program will open and display the file contained within the PNG file.
Because PNG files are intended for graphics images on websites, these files are normally small in file size. Hiding a larger image within the PNG will increase the file size by the same amount as the hidden image -- which may be a tip-off of a file hidden within the PNG image.
