Blur or hide part of a photo

Hide a face, a number plate, an address on an envelope or an account number on a screenshot. The pixels underneath are replaced rather than covered, so there is nothing left to uncover.

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Your file never leaves this device. How that works

How to blur part of a photo

STEP 1

Add the photo or screenshot

Anything you are about to send, post or attach to a complaint. It is opened here on your device.

STEP 2

Paint over what should not be readable

Choose blur, pixelate or a solid block, set the brush size, and drag over the part you want gone. Undo steps back if you go too far.

STEP 3

Save it

You get a PNG with the obscured areas baked in. Send that one and keep your original.

Why a blur layer is not the same as a blur

People have leaked the exact thing they meant to hide by drawing a black box over it in an editor and saving a file that still had the original underneath. Anything that keeps layers, and several phone editors do, means the covering can be peeled back off.

This flattens the picture as you paint. Each stroke reads the pixels that are there, replaces them with a blurred or pixelated version of themselves, and writes that back. By the time you save there is no hidden layer, because there never was one.

A word on pixelation. A coarse mosaic over a face is genuinely hard to reverse, but a light mosaic over a short, predictable string, a six digit code or a number plate, is weaker than it looks, because there are few enough possibilities to work through. If what you are hiding is short and guessable, use a solid block.

Questions

Is my file uploaded anywhere?

No. The work happens inside this tab, on your own machine. Open your browser's network tab while you use the tool, there is no request carrying your file.

Is there a file size limit?

None set by us. Very large files are limited only by your device's memory, and we warn you before that becomes a problem.

Do I need an account?

No, and there is no daily limit either. There is nothing to sign up for.

Can the blur be undone by someone else?

Not from the file you save. The pixels are replaced before the file is written, so the detail is not in there to recover.

Which should I choose?

Blur for faces and backgrounds, pixelate when you want it to be obvious something was hidden, and a solid block for anything short and guessable like a code or a number plate.

Why is the result a PNG?

So the rest of the picture stays sharp. JPG would add its own softening to text and screenshots, which is the opposite of what you want on the parts you are keeping.

Next, you might want to

Remove metadataStrip location and camera dataErase backgroundTrace it out yourself, no AI guessingCrop & rotateStraighten, flip, crop to a ratioText & stickersCaptions, labels, frames, memes