Crypstagram Hides Secret Messages Inside Glitched Photos

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Screen Shot 2013-10-11 at 11.30.20 AM

Crypstagram is a neat service for encrypting messages inside your photos. And as an added bonus it also ruins those photos along the way by adding glitches to them. You probably won’t want to actually use it for good (or evil) though, as the images you use are posted right there on the site in a gorgeous glitchy gallery.

The site works thusly: you choose a photo to upload, then you add a message, an (optional) password and choose the glitches you’d like to inflict. When you;re done, you check the result privately or upload it to the gallery, whereupon anyone can come along and decrypt it as long as they have the password.

Here's one I made at home.
Here’s one I made at home.

It’s a concept piece more than anything else, but it did remind me that you can stash messages inside photos already, as well as glitching things up manually. Here’s how:

Step one: Open a photo in a text editor. Dragging a JPG onto Textedit will do the trick.

Step two: change some things in the resulting text file. For this example I did a find and replace on one letter and replace it with an upper case version of itself throughout the file.

Step three: Save image and enjoy the result.

You could replace step two with “Insert secret message into the image text.”

The point is, glitching and injecting text into image files go together like peaches and inserting text into images of peaches, and Cryptogram does just that (if you have an image of a peach that is. As you can see from the image up top, I had to make do with disgusting banana skins). Even if you aren’t planning on sending secret messages to your bank manager, then you should take a look at the gallery, or even just fire up your text editor and start glitching yourself.

Source: Cryptogram

Via: PetaPixel

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