Obfuscating images

Question

I want to distribute a few images and not allow others to see them unless they are using my program. My intention will be to use JPG files in which I will alter the header so ot

Answer 1

Mghie's answer is about as good as you'll find, but it's not likely to be too effective. If someone wants to look at your images and they know anything about image formats, they'll open it in a hex editor and most likely recognize what they see as a JPEG with the magic header removed.

If you really want to keep someone from viewing your images, construct your own image format, (it's not as hard as it sounds, really,) and put as little metadata in as possible, and then hope that works. Or encrypt them, or put them into an archive, (construct your own archive format for best results,) and hope that works.

Thing is, ultimately, anything that's encoded has to be decoded before it can be shown, and any sufficiently-talented hacker can trace their way through your decoding routine and figure out how it works. Why are you trying to hide things from your users anyway?