How do I hide pictures or put a password onto a folder?

There are several ways one could do this, but circumvention is possible for all but the last

1) Use separate user accounts, then remove the "read" permission from your home folder. Only the account which owns the home folder will be allowed to read the contents. Note that nothing is *encrypted*, so it is possible to override.

This can be overridden by any account with administrator (sudo) privileges, by booting the computer with a liveCD to gain admin rights, or by removing the drive and installing it onto a machine which you have admin rights to.

To do this:
Simply right click your home folder, select properties, then permissions, and remove the "write" and "execute" permissions for "group" and "others"

2) Encrypt your home partition. This cannot be circumvented without the decryption key. Bad passwords could be brute forced (eg names of pets, birthdays, dictionary words (even foreign ones)).

Setting up (2) is a little more complicated: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EncryptedHome

3) Zip the shotwell folder and apply a password to the folder. Shred the folder contents after zipping.

Note that it is easy to "leak" data on computers. For example if you open a folder with images in nautilus, it actually creates a thumbnail copy in your .thumbnails folder

Solution (2) is the most powerful, but can be tricky to get right.

Oops, Circumvention is possible only for (1), sorry. Others require breaking the password

Hi Jessica,

You can select a group of pictures and press 9 to give them a 'Rejected' rating. Then go to View->Filter Photos and select 'All Photos' or another filter that excludes the rejected photos, and they will be hidden from view.

More on ratings from our user guide: http://yorba.org/shotwell/help/rating.html