How in the Tech

Uploading Your Music to Flickr

By Adam Myers ⋅ June 30, 2008 ⋅ Tags: flickr tips, steganography, winamp

Steganography is a method of embedding just about any file into a “container” file, all without noticeably affecting the container file’s content. Though the vast majority of us use the popular photo sharing site Flickr for the storing of our photos and videos, it is possible to use the art of steganography to upload anything. In this quick example, I’ll detail how to upload an mp3 under the guise of a normal looking photo. One caveat up front, this is very much against Flickr’s terms of service and being that it is mostly a free service you’d be wise not to exploit this en mass.

Here is a photo of London in the summer, it will serve as our container file - it’s roughly 215KB.

1. To hide an mp3 file in above JPEG, copy the photo and the desired mp3 into the same folder.
2. Open a Command Prompt (Start -> cmd in Vista) and navigate to the folder.
3. Execute the following in the command prompt: copy /b container_photo.jpg + music.mp3 photo_and_music.jpg - substituting with your actual file names. Be aware that the filesize will be the addition of the container file plus the embedded file.

   

4. Upload the resulting jpg, photo_and_music.jpg to Flickr as you would any other photo.

Here is the resulting photo with an embedded 30 second clip from Weezer’s Pork and Beans single.

When you want to download the photo MP3 from Flickr ensure that you download the original sized image from the All Sizes link. Rename the file extension to .mp3 and open the file in Winamp. Unfortunately, Windows Media Player and iTunes (Quicktime) are unable to play files encoded in this manner.

Lastly, this works will all types of files, not just music!

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