Any smartphone owner with children will have let them 'play' with your device from time to time. The main worry, of course, is how to stop them accidentally deleting your contacts or emails, but another problem is that not all of your multimedia content might be suitable for young eyes and ears. From suggestive music videos to violent film clips, there are a number of reasons why you probably don't want your children to access all your media. But Gallery, helpfully, lists everything it can find on your device. How can you stop it doing this, short of deleting all your favourite files?

[This tutorial was inspired by this AAS Forum thread] 

There are a number of third party utilities which encrypt your files and hide them away beyond the reach of the secret service, but in truth you almost certainly won't want to use these. Firstly because they cost money, secondly because you don't want to have to wait minutes each time while the utility encrypts or decrypts (potentially) tens or hundreds of megabytes of binary video data. But mainly because you're not trying to keep the file contents secret, you're simply keeping them out of obvious reach of a curious child (or passer by).

The trick is to make use of the 'Hidden' flag that can be applied to any file or folder in any file system since the dawn of time (well, DOS, actually). And the way to manipulate this flag is to use the all-purpose freeware file manager FExplorer. Read on...

1. In FExplorer, navigate to the main \Videos folder on your expansion card (disk E), assuming that you haven't already put your video files somewhere else. 
    
    
2. Use 'Options | File | Make Dir' to create a new folder within \Videos, e.g. 'Private'.
     
    
3. Use the '0' key to mark each video file that you'd like to hide. Each will be marked with a little tick icon.
    
    
4. Use 'Options | Edit | Cut' to cut all of the file references to the clipboard.
    
    
5. Navigate into the 'Private' folder and use 'Options | Edit | Paste'. All these files will now be in your new folder.
    
    
6. Go back to the \Videos folder and highlight 'Private'.
   
    
7. Use 'Options | File | Set attributes' and set the 'Hidden' attribute to 'On'.
     
    

With the new folder hidden from normal applications, Gallery won't pick up the files anymore. If Gallery's open already, close it down and then start it up again, to re-scan the file system. You should see that it won't show the files from your 'Private' folder
 

To play the videos yourself, simply navigate into the new folder yourself and open them from FExplorer.