How to automatically hide WhatsApp media from your phone’s gallery [Easy Android Guide]

Popular instant messaging app WhatsApp already lets you download media like photos, videos, audio messages and documents automatically on your smartphone. However, this can sometimes turn out to be embarrassing if you have received NSFW stuff which suddenly appears in your phone’s gallery because you forgot to delete it. Of course, as a solution, you can always disable auto-downloading of media, but, if you are not that can kind of person, WhatsApp rolled out a feature back in June this year that should make things easier for you. With this feature, you can automatically hide WhatsApp media from phone gallery, and with this article, we show you how to do that.

How to automatically hide WhatsApp media from phone gallery

To automatically hide WhatsApp media from phone gallery, open the WhatsApp, go to Settings, and then tap on ‘Chats’. Under the ‘Chats’ menu, you will find a sub-menu called ‘Media visibility‘. Under this sub-menu, you will see an option that says ‘Show media in gallery‘. By default, this feature is turned on because of which all the newly downloaded media shows up in your phone’s gallery. Once you un-check the box, it will be disabled which will automatically hide newly downloaded WhatsApp media from showing up in your phone’s gallery.

How to automatically hide WhatsApp media from phone gallery on per-chat basis

That said, do keep in mind that un-checking the box given in front of the ‘Show media in gallery’ option will automatically hide WhatsApp media received from all the chats – be it private or group. Hence, if you want to automatically hide WhatsApp media on per-chat basis, you will have to head over to that chat’s info section, tap on ‘Media visibility’, tap on ‘No’, and then tap on ‘OK’.

You can automatically hide WhatsApp media received from both private chats as well as group chats.

Having said that, if you have disabled the ‘Show media in gallery’ feature but still want media from certain chats – private or group – to appear in your phone’s gallery, you will have to open the private/group chat, go to the info section, tap on ‘Media visibility’, and then tap on ‘Yes’. Doing this will make sure that media received from that particular chat will still be visible in your phone’s gallery even if you have disabled ‘Show media in gallery’ for all chats.

Note:

• Downloaded media will still be visible in WhatsApp chats even if you hide it from your phone’s gallery
• Only the newly downloaded media will be automatically hidden from phone gallery. Media that’s already downloaded will remain visible.

For more tips and tricks, check out our ‘How-To Guides‘ section.