Blur or Pixelate Part of a Photo

About Blur or Pixelate Part of a Photo

Hide something in a photo before you share it. Drag over a face, a car number plate, an address, a bank card or a name on a document, and it disappears into the picture.

You can cover as many parts as you like, in a rectangle, an oval, or freehand with a brush. Then download a clean PNG or JPG.

Everything happens in your browser. The photo is never uploaded — which, for the kind of picture people usually need to censor, is the part that matters most.

Why it is properly hidden, not just covered

This is the thing that makes a censoring tool trustworthy or useless, so it is worth being clear.

Some tools draw a black box on top of the picture and save the result as a layered file. Anyone who opens it can move the box aside. Others "hide" the area only in the preview and hand you back the original.

Here the effect is drawn into the pixels. The picture you download has no layer to peel off and no original underneath. What you see is exactly what the file contains.

Blur or pixelate — which should you use?

Pixelate is the safer one, and it is the default.

A blur spreads each pixel into its neighbours. The information is still faintly present, and sharpening software can sometimes bring back enough of it to make a face or a few characters readable again.

A mosaic replaces a whole block with one flat average colour. There is nothing left to recover, because dozens of pixels have been thrown away and one colour put in their place.

Use blur when you want something to look softly out of focus. Use pixelate when it genuinely must not be readable.

What you can do with it

• Hide a face before posting a photo of a group or a child
• Blur a car number plate in a photo you are selling a car with
• Cover an address, a name or a signature on a document you need to send
• Hide a bank card number or an account number in a screenshot
• Blur a screen or a whiteboard in an office photo
• Cover a house number before posting a picture of your street

Features

• Rectangle, oval or freehand brush — whichever fits the shape you are hiding
• Pixelate or blur, with a strength control
• Cover as many parts as you like in one photo
• Undo one area at a time, instead of starting again
• Strength follows the size of the area, so a small face and a large sign are hidden equally well
• Baked into the picture — no layer to remove, no original underneath
• PNG or JPG out, with the file size shown before you save
• 100% in your browser — nothing uploaded, no account, no watermark

Good to know

• Check the result at full size before you share it. A small preview can make a face look hidden when it is not.
• Cover a little more than you think you need. Hair, ears and the edge of a jaw are enough for a person to be recognised.
• JPG is smaller, PNG is sharper. For a screenshot with text, choose PNG.
• Hiding something in the picture does not remove it from the photo's hidden data. Use Image Metadata to check what else the file carries, such as the location it was taken.

Related tools

• Image Metadata — see and strip the hidden data in a photo
• Crop Image — cut something out of the picture entirely
• Image Editor — brightness, contrast, rotate and more
• Add Watermark to Image — mark a photo as yours

How to use it

• Drop a photo in — JPG, PNG or WebP
• Choose Pixelate or Blur — pixelate is safer for anything that must not be readable
• Drag over the part you want to hide. Do it again for each extra part
• Use the brush for an awkward shape, or the oval for a face
• Turn the strength up until you cannot read or recognise what was there
• Press Download the picture to save it