Blur, pixelate or black out part of a picture

What this tool does

It hides the parts of a picture you do not want to share: a face, a car plate, an address, an account number, a name in a screenshot. Open a picture, drag boxes over what must go, choose how to hide it, and download a new file. You can use a mouse, a finger or a pen. Undo and redo are there when a box lands in the wrong place.

The work is done in your browser, on your device. The picture is never uploaded, which matters most for exactly this kind of picture.

How to use it

1. Choose a picture, drop it on the page, or paste a copied image such as a screenshot.
2. Pick the effect: solid black, blur or pixelate. With blur or pixelate, set the strength.
3. Drag over each part to hide. The box appears as soon as you let go. Undo (also Ctrl or Cmd with Z) removes the last one, Redo brings it back, Clear all starts again.
4. Press Download. The result has the same format as the picture you opened.

Which effect to choose

Solid black is the only effect that cannot be reversed. It replaces every pixel in the box with black, so the information is no longer in the file. Use it for passwords, account and ID numbers, addresses, faces you must protect, and anything legal or medical.

Blur and pixelation keep a trace of the original. Each blurred or blocky pixel is an average of the pixels that were there, and that average depends on what was underneath. At a low strength, software can sometimes bring text back from a blur, and pixelated text with a known block size has been recovered in published demonstrations. At a high strength the box is a smear that holds far less, but there is no guarantee. Blur and pixelation are fine for a stranger's face in the background of a holiday photo; they are the wrong choice for a secret. The tool warns you when the strength is low.

Strength is measured against the picture, not in pixels, so the same setting looks alike on a thumbnail and on a 12-megapixel photo. Blur radius reaches about 5 percent of the shorter side at 100, and pixel blocks about 4 percent.

Exact boxes and clean files

• Pixel-exact. A box is a whole number of pixels, and its edges round outward, so it always covers at least what you dragged over. An effect reads and changes only the pixels inside its box: a blur never pulls colour in from outside it.
• Applied at full size. The preview uses a reduced copy of large pictures to stay quick, but the saved file is processed at the picture's real resolution.
• Metadata removed. The picture is redrawn into a new file, so camera model, date and GPS position are not copied, and neither is the small preview image that some cameras embed in the file. See the image toolkit to strip metadata from other pictures.
• Same format. JPG stays JPG, PNG stays PNG and WebP stays WebP. GIF, AVIF and BMP are saved as PNG, and an animated GIF keeps only its first frame. JPG and WebP are encoded again at quality 92.
• Limits. One picture at a time, up to 40 MB and about 50 megapixels, with up to 200 boxes.

Before you share it

• Look at the result at full size. Zoom into every box and check that nothing readable remains at the edges.
• Think about what else gives it away. A reflection in a window, a name on a mug or the file name can say what the box hides. Rename the file if the name matters.
• Keep your original private. Delete or never send the unedited file; this tool leaves your original untouched, so it still exists on your device.
• Do not use this for PDFs. Black rectangles added in a PDF editor often leave the text underneath. Here the pixels are replaced, which is why a picture of the page works; see the PDF toolkit for turning images into a PDF afterwards.
• To trim rather than hide, use the image crop tool.