One of the most appreciated functions on WhatsApp is the ability to hide photos and images received from selected groups and chats from the phone gallery, so as not to be among the family and friends photos saved in the gallery, often inappropriate to show. and in any case almost always junk images, GIFs or images for laughing and joking. If we are new to the world of WhatsApp and we start to see appear in the gallery images that we do not want to be shown, let's see together how to make sure that photos and videos received in Whatsapp do not appear in the phone gallery, applying the change both globally and blocking saving only to certain groups or personal chats, so that you can still continue to receive photos and videos from quiet chats or from people we particularly care about.
Hide multimedia elements of WhatsApp
This function of automatic saving of received photos or sending in the phone gallery is not well suited to the chats we normally manage, especially if we have pranksters who share photos and videos of dubious taste or if we have a school or university group with many people. If we add to this that often the most embarrassing photos end up in the album that we want to show to relatives or partners, it is easy to find oneself involved in embarrassing situations to explain. Just in these scenarios it is useful to find out immediately how to hide photos and videos of WhatsApp, both if we use an Android smartphone and if we use a latest generation iPhone.How to hide WhatsApp photos and videos from the Android gallery
To hide every WhatsApp photo and video from the Gallery app of our Android phone, open the app, press the three dots at the top right, go to the Settings> Chat path, and disable the Media visibility option.
By deactivating this option, all multimedia files that are downloaded and displayed in WhatsApp chats will not be shown in the phone gallery, thus significantly increasing the privacy of the contents exchanged on WhatsApp (we will no longer run the risk of seeing them suddenly appear in the gallery).
The photos and videos are still saved in the device until they are manually deleted and are still visible using the file management app (such as Solid Explorer), but at least they will no longer appear in the photo galleries, avoiding confusion with those taken with the camera or obtained from social media such as Instagram.
If, on the other hand, we only want to hide the photos of some groups or individual chats, you can do so by leaving the main option active and opening the chat or group to be modified, pressing on the top right on the three dots, pressing on Group info, then on Visibility of the media and finally selecting the item No.
From that moment all the files received in the chat or in the group will not be visible in the Gallery or in the Google Photos app, without affecting the photos obtainable from the other chats or from the other unconfigured groups.
We can also act in reverse, authorizing only one or two groups / chats to show the photos in the gallery: if in the general options you choose to hide everything, it is possible, through the option of Visibility in the chat tab, to let them be view photos and videos of some conversations in the gallery, leaving all the others out (acting as a sort of whitelist).
How to hide WhatsApp photos and videos from the iPhone gallery
If you use an iPhone the steps to follow are very similar, changing very little compared to the Android version. To be able to hide photos and videos of WhatsApp from the iPhone gallery, open the app, press on the bottom right of Settings, then on the Chat menu and finally press on the item Save in Camera roll .
From now on, all photos and videos will no longer be displayed in the iPhone Photos app, preventing embarrassing photos or junk photos from ending up in your iCloud backup or in the photo collections you take daily.
If we want to hide the photos for a group or for a chat in particular, just open it in the Chat menu of the main screen, press at the top on the name of the chat or group (so as to show the Contact info or Group info ), scroll the screen to find the entry Save in Camera Roll and finally change the entry to Never .
By doing this the photos of this group or chat will not be shown in the iPhone gallery. Obviously we can also act in reverse, applying a sort of whitelist to chats or groups that can save photos and videos: we disable saving photos globally (as seen a little while ago), we open the chat or group to create on the exception and let's go back to Save in Camera Roll to be able to select the item Always .
Conclusions
With these simple settings we can significantly increase the level of privacy when we use WhatsApp, preventing embarrassing photos or useless videos from appearing in the phone gallery. If, on the other hand, we have already activated this item globally and we want some chats or groups to be able to save the photos, just act in whitelist mode as seen in detail in the previous chapters.To further increase the privacy of WhatsApp we recommend that you apply a password to access the app, as seen in our guide How to protect WhatsApp by blocking access with a password . If, on the other hand, we want to completely hide messages, chats and contacts on WhatsApp, we refer you to reading our article Hiding WhatsApp messages, chats and contacts .
We are looking for a way to hide all the photos and videos in the smartphone gallery "> How to Hide photos on iPhone, also password protected and How to hide photos, videos and apps on Android, where we will find all the methods and apps that can be used to hide compromising multimedia elements.
