Visual cryptography (VC) is a secret sharing cryptographic technique, which permits visual information that is encrypted in such a way that the decrypted information shows the visual image. Security is the common problem that arises in the general VC technique. To secure the visual information, an effective method is proposed using a developed sailfish invasive weed optimization (SIWO) algorithm. At first, the grayscale image is shared with multiple parties, and here the shared images are encrypted and decrypted to reconstruct the original image back. The key generation is done using the developed SIWO-based data sharing approach. Here, the developed approach offered the peak signal-to-noise ratiof 34.870 and 33.711 dB for Lena and Cameraman images, respectively, and it attains better performance in terms of secret image sharing. © 2021 Wiley Periodicals LLC.