This is kind of ridiculous that there seems to be no way to simply password protect a local file on windows 10, other than compressing it and adding a password through WinRar, doing stupid unsecure methods or doing through Windows which doesn't even seem to work for me. Select the Advanced button and select the Encrypt contents to secure data check box. Right-click (or press and hold) a file or folder and select Properties. Though, File encryption is not available in Windows 10 Home. I have also tried to do it through windows explorer in the advanced properties with the encrypt option, however I couldn't do that because the option to encrypt it was greyed out. Only someone with the right encryption key (such as a password) can decrypt it. I have tried using the technique of creating a bat file to hide the folder with a password, however this no longer locks and hides the file for some reason and it is unsceure anyway due to the bat file being able to be opened. I currently use WinRar but I absolutely hate how every file is compressed and therefore if I have a file full of photos open in WinRar, for example, each one takes a while to load and I can't navigate through them using arrow keys.

It doesn't need to necessarily be encrypted or anything it just needs to be secure. Thanks to BitLocker encryption for drives built into Windows 10, you can also easily create a password-protected folder natively on the platform.

Password protect folder windows 10