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Picture Hide trick no longer works V2

20 replies · 7,162 views · Started 03 December 2007

riverboat 03 Dec 2007, 19:01

I have TomTom installed on my N95, i used to use a tip found in the N73 forum, reproduced below.....always worked great, removed all those hundreds of images the gallery found in the TOMTOM folder.....since my upgrade to V2 and subsequent re-install of TOMTOM, that trick no longer works, i can't hide the tomtom pictures any more.

can anyone shed any light on this as it's so annoying.

As an update, even more strange, there are two folders in tomtom that have images, Great Britain and raster

The "tip/trick" when applied to the Great Britain works and it hides the images.
However, when applied to the raster folder, it then recreates the PAlbTN folder, resulting in the images being shown in the Gallery again.

Can anybody help?


you CAN remove things from the gallery its just a little long winded...

- first attach the phone to your pc (or pop your memory card into a card reader) and locate the image you want to hide.

- Remove the _PAlbTN folder that you can see as a subfolder of the location the image is stored in

- Create a new folder within the memory card and make it hidden (right click, properties and tick the "hidden" check box does the trick in windows)

- move the files you want to hide to the new folder

- go back to gallery and hooray, no more file in gallery !

NOTE: Just making the folder that the file is in a hidden folder, even with the _PAlbTN folder removed, will NOT work but once you've established that the file you want to hide has gone from the folder you can rename the newly created folder to the same name as the folder which the file came from originally. This is perfect if your trying to remove application pictures as if you dont have the file in the location its meant to be in the app wont work but by renaming the new hidden folder to that of the name of the original folder the app will still work AND keep the file hidden

PhreakTastic 03 Dec 2007, 21:56

Yeah same here, got so much junk in gallery, the hidden folder makes no difference 😡

randomfan 03 Dec 2007, 22:23

Not sure why you are taking such a long route to hide photos. Just make the files you want to hide themselves hidden, no need to move anything, still need to delete the _PAlbTN folder though.

You can probably set the hidden attribute when viewing the memory card in mass storage mode on PC too, but I just use one of the free file managers (Fexplorer, Y-Browser, for examples) and do it on the phone.

3Shirts 04 Dec 2007, 09:26

Yeah, hiding the folder no longer seems to hide the contained images but it doesn't matter, you just have to set each image as hidden. You can do that with y-browser (free) on the phone itself or through a connected PC. Delete the _PAlbTN folder too and you are done.

riverboat 07 Dec 2007, 21:53

Hi
i finally got a chance to try your suggestion today,
I'm afraid it doesn't work for me
i connect the phone using data mode, browse to the raster folder, delete the _PAlbTN folder, then control selsct all files, set thier properties to hidden and then remove the phone, unfortunately the first thing it does is recreate the _PAlbTN folder, thus showing the images in the gallery again

randomfan 08 Dec 2007, 00:06

riverboat wrote:Hi
i finally got a chance to try your suggestion today,
I'm afraid it doesn't work for me
i connect the phone using data mode, browse to the raster folder, delete the _PAlbTN folder, then control selsct all files, set thier properties to hidden and then remove the phone, unfortunately the first thing it does is recreate the _PAlbTN folder, thus showing the images in the gallery again

I've never tried doing it on the PC, just tried it with FExplorer on the phone right now, hid a photo and it disappeared from Gallery, so it definitely works. I've always used Y-Brower in the past for the same thing. I'll try setting the attribute on the PC later and see if that works for me.

riverboat 08 Dec 2007, 10:39

that would be okay for the odd picture, but tomtom has loads of the buggers. there are 113 of them in the raster folder, so doing them one at a time would make my mind blow up !

randomfan 08 Dec 2007, 12:12

riverboat wrote:that would be okay for the odd picture, but tomtom has loads of the buggers. there are 113 of them in the raster folder, so doing them one at a time would make my mind blow up !

File managers in Symbian aren't that primitive you know... 😊 you can mark lots of files and change the attribute in one go as well.

mamoo_51 08 Dec 2007, 17:37

3Shirts wrote:Yeah, hiding the folder no longer seems to hide the contained images but it doesn't matter, you just have to set each image as hidden. You can do that with y-browser (free) on the phone itself or through a connected PC. Delete the _PAlbTN folder too and you are done.

Strange, i've only hidden the folder and it works the same as always for me

riverboat 11 Dec 2007, 01:05

So any suggestions as to why the Great Britain map images stay hidden, but the raster ones don't?

PS, It also does exactly the same on my husbands phone !

riverboat 11 Dec 2007, 01:11

Latest update.

I've installed y-browser. and followed the instructions above, and it makes no difference. I can hide any image / folder i want

EXCEPT the raster folder for TOMTOM, it always recreates that folder.
And even though the attributes are set to hidden for both the _PAlbTN folder AND the files in the raster folder, everytime i open the gallery the bloody images are back.

Then when i browse back to the raster file the -PAlbTN folder is back, though all the attributes are still set to hidden

mamoo_51 11 Dec 2007, 07:35

Create a NEW folder within the memory card and make it hidden

does the trick for me. I always found that if you just set the attributes to hidden it doesnt work but if you create a new folder, make that hidden, copy all the pictures to it and then delete the original folder the pics will be hidden.

Of course this will cause problems if your moving tomtom pics as it will expect them to be in a certain location but if you move the contents of the first folder to the new one, put the memory card back in the phone and THEN repeat the process moving all the pics back to a hidden folder with the same name as the original it should work.

Hope that makes sense !!

It's a very strange trick but it does work (for me anyway :tongue😊

3Shirts 11 Dec 2007, 09:04

riverboat wrote:Latest update.

I've installed y-browser. and followed the instructions above, and it makes no difference. I can hide any image / folder i want

EXCEPT the raster folder for TOMTOM, it always recreates that folder.
And even though the attributes are set to hidden for both the _PAlbTN folder AND the files in the raster folder, everytime i open the gallery the bloody images are back.

Then when i browse back to the raster file the -PAlbTN folder is back, though all the attributes are still set to hidden

You don't want to hide the _PAlbTN folder, you need to delete it. All it is is the thumbnails for the gallery. Hide the images themselves and then delete the _PAlbTN folder everywhere it appears in the main tomtom folder and subfolders.

dchky 11 Dec 2007, 09:36

What worked for me was to rename the directory and set its attribute to hidden, open the gallery, pictures disappear, then rename the directory back to what it was.

eg.
e:\mgmaps - renamed to e:\mgmaps1 and attribute set to hidden.
Open the gallery, pictures can no longer be found, so the gallery dumps them from the list.
Rename e:\mgmaps1 back to e:\mgmaps and life is good.
(Same process also worked for TomTom)

Just takes a few seconds with X-plore or any other decent file system app.

I don't really use the built in gallery anymore though - swapped to resco picture viewer, much faster.

3Shirts 11 Dec 2007, 10:18

dchky wrote:What worked for me was to rename the directory and set its attribute to hidden, open the gallery, pictures disappear, then rename the directory back to what it was.

eg.
e:\mgmaps - renamed to e:\mgmaps1 and attribute set to hidden.
Open the gallery, pictures can no longer be found, so the gallery dumps them from the list.
Rename e:\mgmaps1 back to e:\mgmaps and life is good.
(Same process also worked for TomTom)

Just takes a few seconds with X-plore or any other decent file system app.

I don't really use the built in gallery anymore though - swapped to resco picture viewer, much faster.

That's just a really long way round of deleting the _PAlbTN, getting the gallery to do it.

dchky 11 Dec 2007, 13:42

Deleting the _PAlbTN thumbnail directories wont work properly in V20 firmware anyway, thus all the posts with people suggesting different methods. In some cases there can be hundreds of these directories floating about the file system.

Renaming the root directory that contains the images one wants to hide, setting the hidden attribute, opening the gallery as another task, switching back to the file manager, these are all just steps that take only a few seconds with handy taskman installed, or even just using the built in task manager to switch. No need to delete anything.

I guess no single method is better than any other, just wanted to point out what worked for me.

riverboat 13 Dec 2007, 16:20

3Shirts wrote:You don't want to hide the _PAlbTN folder, you need to delete it. All it is is the thumbnails for the gallery. Hide the images themselves and then delete the _PAlbTN folder everywhere it appears in the main tomtom folder and subfolders.

Sorry my mistake , i meant to say that i HAD deleted the pal folder and set all the files to hidden....
And as i have said before is that i can doall of these things with any other folder/file on my phone, except the raster one for tomtom

riverboat 13 Dec 2007, 16:36

dchky wrote:What worked for me was to rename the directory and set its attribute to hidden, open the gallery, pictures disappear, then rename the directory back to what it was.

eg.
e:\mgmaps - renamed to e:\mgmaps1 and attribute set to hidden.
Open the gallery, pictures can no longer be found, so the gallery dumps them from the list.
Rename e:\mgmaps1 back to e:\mgmaps and life is good.
(Same process also worked for TomTom)

Just takes a few seconds with X-plore or any other decent file system app.

I don't really use the built in gallery anymore though - swapped to resco picture viewer, much faster.

Hi, two things

1/I have tried renaming the directory, which does remove them from the gallery. BUT as soon as i reset the name to the correct one, (for TOMTOM to work) they are then all back in the gallery. This doesn't happen to the Great_Britain map folder, they stay hidden....where you are mentioning mgmaps, that sounds like a different program, i'm referring specifically to the TOMTOM folder called "raster"

2/Rescoe viewer does look good, however i have three phones with this problem, and i dont want to fork out the licence fee three times.