WhatsApp has currently more than 1 Billion users, where people send messages, share photos, videos, location and other files with their contacts. As people receive lots of photos from their contacts, they look for the ways to stop WhatsApp from saving pictures to gallery. As there could be private or other personal photos which you do not want others to see when you hand over your phone to someone. One way is to stop WhatsApp from Auto downloading photos and videos but still when a user views it on WhatsApp, it will appear in the gallery. So let’s better have a look how we can hide WhatsApp images from gallery in Android and iPhone.
Android and iPhone, both have two different methods and none of them require to install any app to achieve the task. However, Android has a bit longer task than iOS.
Prevent WhatsApp Photos from Saving to Camera Roll in iPhone
The method in iOS is very simple compared to Android. It has an inbuilt setting. Let’s take a look.
1) Open WhatsApp and tap on Settings.
2) Now tap on Chats option and look for the Save to Camera Roll feature.
3) Now, tap on the toggle button to switch off the Setting.
This will stop all the images from showing on your camera roll of your iPhone.
Stop WhatsApp from Saving Pictures to Gallery on Android
In order to hide the pictures from gallery, you need a file manager on your Android device. If you do not have any, then install it from Google Play Store.
Now let’s look at the steps.
1) Open File Manager, and navigate to WhatsApp->Media->WhatsApp Images folder.
2) Next, tap on 3 dots icon and then tap on Show hidden files (The option may differ according to the file manager app you are using) as shown in the picture below.
3) Now again tap on the 3 dots icon and create New folder and name the folder as “.nomedia“. Now close the file manager app.
From now onwards whenever you receive any photo from your WhatsApp contact, it will not be shown in the gallery.
Note1: The images will be saved in the WhatsApp Images folder but will not appear in the gallery.
Note2: In some Android version, the trick doesn’t work instantly. So in order to make this work, just restart your Android device.
Note3: All the previous downloaded images from WhatsApp will remain there in the gallery but the new ones will not appear.
If you want to show the images in your gallery, then again go to the WhatsApp Images folder using file manager and delete the “.nomedia” file.
I hope the above two methods helped Android and iPhone users to stop WhatsApp from saving pictures to Gallery or Camera Roll. If you have faced any issues while following the above steps, do let us know via comments.
