Blur, Pixelate or Redact Part of a Photo
Drag a rectangle over the face, licence plate, house number, address bar or account number you want hidden. Three ways to hide it, and they are not equally strong: a solid block replaces the pixels and nothing can bring them back, pixelate keeps the shape and discards the detail, and a blur only smears it — a light one can be partly undone, and the tool says so when you have chosen one. Nothing is uploaded, which for a tool whose whole job is privacy is the only sensible design.
Drop a photo or screenshot here
JPG / PNG / WebP · multiple allowed · same region applied to each
How to blur out part of a photo
- Drop the photo in — the preview appears below the file list.
- Drag a rectangle over the part you want hidden. The label shows its size in real pixels.
- Pick pixelate (recommended) or blur, and set the strength. For pixelate, the strength is the block size in pixels: 24 gives coarse blocks, 8 gives fine ones.
- Click Apply and check the result before you post it. Zoom in on the region — if you can still make out what it said, raise the strength.
How strong is strong enough
The test is not "does it look blurry", it is "how many pixels of real information are left". Pixelating with a block size of 24 means a 240-pixel-wide plate is reduced to ten average values — nothing recoverable. A block size of 4 leaves sixty, and the shapes of digits can survive that. As a rule of thumb, use a block size of at least a tenth of the region's width, and never rely on a light blur over text. If it is truly sensitive, remove those pixels rather than averaging them.
What else the photo is telling people
Blurring a face fixes the visible half of the problem. The file itself may still carry the GPS coordinates of where it was taken, the phone that took it, and the exact timestamp — enough to identify a home address regardless of what is blurred. Check with EXIF viewer, and strip it with Remove EXIF before you share. (Re-saving here already drops the metadata as a side effect of re-encoding, but files you have not edited still carry it all.)
FAQ
Blur, pixelate or block — which is safe?
Solid block is the only one that is unconditionally safe, which is why it is now the default: the pixels are replaced with one colour and nothing survives to be recovered. A blur averages neighbouring pixels, and undoing a weak blur is a whole genre of research and tooling, particularly on text and numbers. Pixelation discards more — the average of a block is all that is left — but a fine block size over a short, predictable string can still be brute-forced by searching for the text that would produce that pattern. Use blur for aesthetics, pixelate when the shape should stay legible, and a block for anything you would mind seeing recovered. The tool warns you when the strength is small relative to the region you selected.
Is redacting text in a screenshot safe this way?
With Solid block, yes: the region is filled, and a filled region has nothing left in it. With blur or a fine pixelation, not reliably — short, predictable strings such as a six-digit number or a name from a small set can sometimes be recovered, because few candidates would produce that pattern. Cover it rather than obscure it, or crop the region out entirely with Crop JPG.
Does it apply to a whole batch?
Yes, and the same rectangle is used for each file, which is what you want for a series of screenshots taken at the same resolution with the same header. For photos where the face is in a different place each time, do them one at a time.
Can I blur the whole image instead of a region?
Yes — switch the scope to "Whole image". That is the setting for background plates, blurred hero images, and placeholder art.
Is the photo uploaded anywhere?
No, and that is the entire reason this page exists. Uploading a photo to a stranger's server so they can blur the private part of it defeats the purpose. Everything here happens in your browser, and you can disconnect from the network before you start.