Protect Your Photographs from Strangers

Read how to protect your photographs that are meant for your eyes only from theft and from people using the same personal computer.

Hacking

There are wrong beliefs about someone hacking into your computer. Nobody has any interest to search on exactly your personal computer. The knowledge someone requires to get past all the protection of the operating system ensures this person a big enough income so that he/she doesn’t have to get involved with such foolish matters. When people are young, they attempt even things like this, but if they want to use their knowledge to show off in front of their friends, they’ll go after an institution and even then, they won’t steal. That’s why you have to be careful to have your firewall up, have your operating system upgraded and have a decent anti-virus programme. Regularly check your hard drive for viruses and Trojan horses. I don’t want to simplify things, but the danger of someone hacking into your computer and looking at your photographs is pretty small.

Editing and saving

Let’s say you have children and you want to hide your naughty pictures from them. Or from your parents. The first important thing is to have separate accounts on your computer and you have to be the administrator. Save your photographs into a file with an obscure name, System file, subfolder Data, subfolder Cashe. These and similar words mean something only to people in the computer business, while everyone feels resistance when they see them. They also sound so important that nobody will search them.

The next secret important for your photographs is the filename extensions. Pictures usually have extensions like.jpg, .gif, films mpeg, avi, …. The operating system recognizes them and creates an icon. When you click on them, the appropriate programme starts running. But you can erase the extension or replace it with something else. You put in txt instead of jpg. You will get a warning that it’s not wise to change the extension name, but just ignore it. If anyone finds these files, they’ll not be able to open them just by clicking on them. You won’t be able to open them directly as well, but you’ll have to run a programme for watching and editing pictures and then open the pictures with this programme.

The next option is to simply put your photographs into an archive. You can do this with various programmes. The most usual is Winrar. The pictures are compressed in size into only one file with the .rar extension. You can protect this file with a password, which actually disables unwanted guests from seeing your photographs. The downside is that you can’t view the picture yourself, but you have to extract the files every time you want to view them.

Be smarter

All this prevention is of no use if you do other foolish things! Don’t send your photographs to your friends, especially not via email. Don’t post the pictures on “anonymous” sites. Edit them, so that your face isn’t visible or at least blur it. When you view your photographs on your computer, the computer keeps track of your last activities. Windows is particularly kind when it comes to this. But this means that the next user only presses start and goes to recent documents and he’ll see the last few pictures. This is best avoided if you open a few other documents after watching the pictures. It’s best to save your photographs on a USB key or a flash drive. Burning the photos onto a CD or DVD isn’t recommendable. They can fall into the wrong hands and also get damaged very quickly. With a bit of knowledge, everyone should keep the privacy of their private information.