Four ways to hide something: pixelate, gaussian blur, solid redaction or an emoji cover. Paint with a brush or drag a rectangle, and control exactly what disappears.
Drop your image here
or click to browse · JPG, PNG, WEBP, HEIC · max 20 MB
Automatic face detection routinely misses profiles, partly covered faces and people in the background. Painting the area yourself guarantees that exactly what you intended is hidden, and nothing else.
Pixelation and blur suit faces in casual photos. Solid redaction is the correct choice for account numbers, addresses and ID documents, because unlike blur it removes the information entirely.
Images that need redacting are exactly the ones you should not be sending to a stranger server. Everything here runs on your own device.
Step by step
Drag it onto the box above or click to browse. The file stays on your device.
Pixelate for a classic mosaic, gaussian blur for a softer look, solid block for documents, or an emoji to cover a face playfully.
The brush follows your cursor or finger for irregular shapes. The rectangle is faster for lines of text and document fields.
Drag over what should disappear. Raise the intensity if any detail is still readable, and use undo if you go too far.
Choose the format and quality, or set an exact target in kilobytes, then download the protected image.
FAQ
Automatic detection is convenient but unreliable: it commonly misses faces in profile, faces that are partly obscured, and small faces in the background. When the purpose is protecting someone's identity, a tool that silently misses one face is worse than no tool at all.
The exported file contains only the averaged blocks, so the original pixels are genuinely gone. However, research has shown that weak pixelization can sometimes be defeated when an attacker already has candidate images to compare against. For anything sensitive, use a higher intensity or a solid block.
Solid block. Blurring and pixelation both preserve some structure of the underlying content, which is why redaction standards call for opaque covering rather than distortion. A solid rectangle over an account number removes the information completely.
It fades the hidden region into the surrounding photo instead of leaving a visible hard circle. It looks more natural on faces, though for document redaction you should switch it off so the covered boundary is unambiguous.
Yes, as a side effect. Because the exported image is redrawn from pixels, EXIF data including GPS coordinates and camera details does not carry over. That matters, since location metadata can identify someone just as effectively as a visible face.
Yes. Each stroke or rectangle is recorded, and Ctrl+Z steps back through them. Clear all restores the untouched original if you want to start again.
Yes. The brush follows touch input, so you can paint directly on the screen of a phone or tablet with your finger.
No. The image is decoded and edited entirely inside your browser using the canvas element, so it never leaves your device at any stage.
This tool lets you blur a face online or hide any other private detail in a photograph, such as a licence plate, a street address, a signature or an account number on a document. Four effects are available: pixelation for the familiar mosaic look, gaussian blur for something softer and more natural, a solid block for genuine redaction, and an emoji cover when you want to hide a face without making the image look censored.
Two selection tools handle different jobs. The brush follows your cursor or finger and suits irregular shapes such as a face or a hand. The rectangle is faster and cleaner for lines of text, form fields and anything with straight edges. Intensity controls how much detail survives, and a soft-edge option blends the covered region into the surrounding photo.
For sensitive material the choice of effect matters. Blur and pixelation distort information but preserve some of its structure, which is why redaction guidance for documents specifies opaque covering. If you are hiding an identification number or an address, use the solid block rather than a blur.
Everything runs inside your browser through the canvas element, which matters more here than anywhere else on this site: an image you need to redact is precisely the image you should not upload to an unknown server. A useful side effect is that EXIF metadata, including GPS coordinates that can pinpoint where a photo was taken, is stripped from the exported file automatically.
Once the image is protected, you may want the watermark tool before sharing it publicly, the converter and compressor to reduce the file size, or the platform resizer to match a specific upload requirement.