How to hide your profile picture on WhatsApp Messenger

As well as being the world's most popular messaging service, WhatsApp is also a social media platform and contains some of the typical features you'd associate with other social media sites like Facebook or Instagram. One very social aspect of WhatsApp is the profile picture, with this appearing alongside all of your messages. Some people, though, may wish to hide their WhatsApp profile picture.

There are a variety of reasons why you may want to hide your profile photo on WhatsApp Messenger. So, we explain here how you can do that and how you can even hide your WhatsApp from only certain people.

Changing your profile picture privacy settings on WhatsApp

Firstly, open WhatsApp and go to 'Settings' then 'Account' then 'Privacy' then 'Profile Photo'. There, you'll see three options: 'Everyone', 'My Contacts' and 'Nobody'.

The default option is for everybody to be able to view your profile picture. Even if they can't see your name, they can usually see your photo.

But, you can change this and select for nobody at all to be able to see your photo or you can use the in-between option of 'My Contacts' to limit this access to your photo to those who you have saved in your contacts book.

Hiding your WhatsApp profile photo from specific people with the #31# trick

If there is someone you want to hide your photo from, but while still keeping their contact saved, there is a WhatsApp trick you can apply.

Go into your contacts folder on your phone - not your WhatsApp contacts, but your actual phone's contacts. Then, edit the person in question's number by putting #31# before their number, even before any international dialling codes.

This #31# trick then eliminates that contact from your WhatsApp folder of contacts, but it means this person remains in your phone book for whenever you might require their number. In other words, this #31# contact will no longer count for the 'My Contacts' option in your WhatsApp privacy settings and you'll be able to stop that person from viewing your profile picture on the messaging app.