Want to hide some files in plain sight? You can make a folder invisible to the eye, but not to the click with this neat trick. I learned this in 6th grade to hide files and apps from prying eyes, and despite it’s simplicity it worked to store games, movies, and pictures on school computers without anyone knowing where they were kept. Believe it or not it works, and if you have limited access to the Terminal it beats using the period method to hide folders.
- Right-click here and save this transparent PNG file to your desktop as ‘transparent.png’
- Go to your desktop and open “transparent.png” into Preview and hit Command+A followed by Command+C – this selects the entire files contents and copies them into your clipboard
- Now go back to the Mac OS X desktop and hit Command+Shift+N to create a new folder, name the folder nothing by hitting the spacebar a few times
- Now select the folder named nothing (” “) and hit Command+i to “Get Info” about the folder
- Click on the folder icon in the upper left corner and hit Command+V to paste the previously copied transparent.png file as the folders icon
Your folder is now invisible to the eye. In some ways this is preferable to creating a hidden folder by prepending a . in front of the name because it’s still accessible from the Finder’s GUI with a well placed mouse click, and as I mentioned before it doesn’t require the use of the Terminal to create. It’s also advantageous because it doesn’t show up if someone makes hidden files visible.
I would suggest burying this folder somewhere in an obscure place on the desktop or elsewhere to further obfuscate any attempts at finding it
I would suggest burying this folder somewhere in an obscure place on the desktop or elsewhere to further obfuscate any attempts at finding it
Just remember the contents of the folder are not invisible, and could still be found via Spotlight or Recent Items if someone knew what to look for. To do that, you’d have to exclude the folder from Spotlight search and then clear out the Recent Items from time to time.
Here’s what such a folder will look like if you open it, notice the window bar has no name in it:
Thanx to osxdaily.com
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