Image steganography is the art of hiding messages in an image. This is a great way to send a secret message to a friend without drawing attention to it. Compare this method to simply sending someone an encrypted piece of text. No matter how strong the encryption method is, If someone is monitoring the communication, they'll find it highly suspicious.
Encode
Upload your image and enter the text you'd like to have hidden in the image. A new image will be created which appears identical to the original but now has your text hidden within it. Send this new image to your friend.
Decode
If you've received an encoded image, upload it and the hidden text will be extracted for you.
The "techy" details
Image file formats
Most popular image file formats can be uploaded, such as JPEG, GIF and PNG. Regardless of the original image file format, the final image which includes the hidden text will be a PNG. The downside of this is that PNG images can often be significantly larger in file size than the same image saved as a JPEG or GIF. The upside is that PNG uses a lossless compression method which ensures pixel data is not disturbed. This is what makes it possible to hide text in the image.
Text/Message length
If the text you enter is larger than the amount of text that can be hidden in the image, your text will be truncated. Run the image through our decode service before sending it to your friend.
Method
Some of the free image steganography services online hide your text in the images EXIF data. Usually you'd expect to find information such as the photos exposure and aperture in this area, but it can be exploited to hide other text instead. The upside of this is that there's absolutely no changes to the appearance of the image, the downside is that this information is easily viewable.
Here at PhilTools we make adjustments to the image pixel data, to hide your text within the image. These changes aren't noticeable to the human eye and are only decodable through our online decode service. Currently the text is stored without any encryption or password options.