Abstract Image steganography is the process of concealing secret information within a cover image. The main challenge of steganography is to ensure that the embedding process does not significantly alter the cover file. In this paper, instead of modifying a cover image to carry information, steganography is performed using a set of images. These images are selected from a dataset of natural images. Each image in the dataset is divided into a number of non-overlapping patches. Then, indexing of the patches is performed based on their features. The secret image is also divided into a set of non-overlapping patches. Similar versions of the patches in the secret image are searched in the dataset to identify candidate patches. The final candidate is selected by calculating the minimum distance between the feature vector of the patches in the secret image and the patches in the dataset. Finally, the receiver retrieves the secret image using the pieces of selected images. Since, instead of embedding information in a cover image, a set of patches from natural images are selected without any changes, this approach can resist change-tracking tools, as demonstrated by experimental results, and also offers the advantage of high embedding capacity.