Put Music in Images Uploaded to Flickr and Picasa Web Albums

Online services like Flickr and Google’s Picasa are primarily photo-hosting and sharing sites. This means that apart from image files, you can’t really upload any other type of file you choose.

Well, all that is about to change. Digital Inspiration has come up with a way to embed or hide an mp3 file within a jpeg image uploaded to these photo-hosting sites. The process is quite simple and only requires a little bit of command-line work.

Firstly, copy your mp3 file and an image file to one folder. Next up, switch to the command-line interface. You can do this by going to Start > Run > Cmd. From here, navigate to the folder where the song and image are saved. Then, type in the following command:

‘copy /b mypicture.jpg + mysong.mp3 mynewpicture.jpg’

Replace ‘mypicture’ and ‘mysong’ with the actual file names. The resultant image ‘mynewpicture’ will contain your mp3 file in image format and can be uploaded directly to Flickr. When you want to save this song to your computer, open up the page containing the image, select ‘All sizes’ and download the original image size. Change the extension of the file to mp3 and you are good to go.

While I’ve used an mp3 as an example of embedding a file within an image, you can pretty much use the same method for any type of file. However, remember that you cannot hide file size so if you upload images that are 5MB and 10MB big, Flickr is obviously going to get suspicious. What do you think of this trick? Are you concerned about the potential for abuse? Let me know in the comments.