Put Music in Images Uploaded to Flickr and Picasa Web Albums

Cheryl
Jun 12, 2008
Updated • Dec 7, 2012
Internet
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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.

Update: There are not many situations where you may want to upload music files to Flickr. It makes a lot more sense to upload them to a file hosting site or cloud syncing service instead.

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Comments

  1. V1rU5 said on May 7, 2010 at 1:17 pm
    Reply

    wtf this doesn”t work for me can”t find the fricken file in my cmd thing

  2. rAmbo said on April 29, 2009 at 10:02 pm
    Reply

    really man gr8 trick to combine two files

  3. CountZero said on March 19, 2009 at 10:37 pm
    Reply

    another option if you really want to do it is to use something similiar to stegoshare

  4. Daniel R. said on December 29, 2008 at 11:43 pm
    Reply

    This is pretty neat. Kind of changes the way I think about files. Rename the image to JPG and it opens as a photo. Rename to MP3 and the song plays. Strangely, I can only get this trick to work with those two filetypes. PNG, PDF, and GIF must have different header structures (I guess they are uncompressed, for one thing, unlike JPG and MP3).

  5. Ashish Mohta said on June 12, 2008 at 8:33 pm
    Reply

    This is direct violation with TOS of Flickr. Here is one line which says

    “forge headers or otherwise manipulate identifiers in order to disguise the origin of any Content transmitted through the Service;”

    I have written a post on this Careful if you are uploading music files disguised as Images .

    Pardon me , If you dont like the link to be left you can delete. Its the recent post of mine.

  6. darkkosmos said on June 12, 2008 at 5:47 pm
    Reply

    It’s very easy to scan a picture for hidden data, unless flickr is stupid I hope they do that

  7. Thomas Murphy said on June 12, 2008 at 5:23 pm
    Reply

    Now we can really say that a picture is worth a thousand words.
    Congratulations on the new design.

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