Hide media on external sd card, lollipop and above I want an app that can hide/encrypt selected pictures and video on the external memory card without moving them to internal storage where space is at a premium. This is the problem with Keepsafe and other popular apps in this category. I have rooted my phone &amp; am using the Xposed media scanner module to exclude a hidden directory on the memory card, and done the platform.xml workaround to make the external card writable.

I've also wanted to try the symbolic link trick by placing the files on an ext2 formatted partition on the memory card used for link2sd and then ln -sf from the internal storage, but that doesn't work either. The media scanner exclusion works, but the files themselves are still readable on the memory card. Is there any app, even a root requiring one, that can encrypt or hide the files as they are despite the stupid restrictions put in since Kitkat?
by renaming a file from filename.txt to .filename.txt (add a dot "." before the name) you will hide the file. I.e. it will not show up on any file explorer, (unless it is set to show hidden files.)

If you want to hide, say movie files from appearing in your media player, or music files from appearing in your music player, or even photos from appearingin your gallery, (or any other type of file from showing in an app except a file explorer), you can change the file extention to anything else or remove it completely.
I recommend just changing the dot "." to a blank space, that way you can still identify the file yourself and you wont forget the file extension in case you ever need it.

like so: from "filename.avi" to "filename avi".