Blur / redact region
Pixelate or blur a selected rectangle.
This runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.
About Blur / redact region
Pixelates a rectangular region into twelve-pixel blocks, overwriting the original pixels rather than covering them, and doing it in your browser so the unredacted file never leaves your device.
You need to share a screenshot that has an account number in it, a photo with a number plate, a document with an address. Two things routinely go wrong. The first is drawing a black rectangle in software that stores it as a separate object, which anyone can select and move aside — this is how redacted court filings and PDFs keep leaking. The second is uploading the unredacted original to a website in order to redact it.
Here the selected rectangle is resampled into twelve-pixel blocks, each taking the colour of its top-left pixel, and those blocks are written back into the image data itself. What you download is a flat raster with no layers, no annotation objects and no original hiding underneath. The only copy of the unredacted file is the one on your disk, because the page never had anywhere to send it.
Pixelation is not magic, and the honest warning matters here. When the hidden content is predictable — a six-digit code, a date, a number plate in a standard typeface — someone can render every candidate value, pixelate each one the same way, and match the pattern. The defence is coarseness: if the text is forty pixels tall, twelve-pixel blocks leave a lot of structure, so shrink the image first and the same blocks swallow much more of each character.
How to use Blur / redact region
- 1Drop the image onto the panel and find the area you need to hide.
- 2Set X and Y to the top-left corner of that area, then W and H to its size in image pixels.
- 3Click Apply and inspect the preview at full size before you Download.
- 4If anything is still legible, resize the image smaller and redact again.
What it won't do
- One rectangle per pass; applying again redacts a fresh copy of the original.
- Block size is fixed at twelve pixels for pixelate, and the blur radius is fixed too.
- The output is always PNG, whatever you put in.
Common questions
Is pixelating enough to hide sensitive information?
It depends entirely on what is underneath. Pixelation genuinely destroys detail, but if the content is short and predictable — a card number, a licence plate, a postcode — an attacker can pixelate every possible value and compare. Faces and handwriting are far harder to recover. For structured text, reduce the image size first so each block covers more of the characters.
How do I blur a face before posting a photo?
Position the X, Y, W and H sliders so the rectangle covers the whole head, then click Apply and check the preview. Bear in mind that a pixelated face is only part of the problem: clothing, tattoos, a house number in the background, and the photo's own GPS metadata all identify people perfectly well on their own.
Can the pixelation be undone?
Not from the downloaded file. The original pixel values in that region are overwritten and no record of them is kept, so there is nothing in the file to reverse. The recoverability risk is guesswork from outside — matching the pattern against candidate values — rather than anything stored in the image.
Does the redacted copy still carry the photo's metadata?
No. The download is rebuilt from raw pixel data as a PNG, so EXIF from the original — including GPS coordinates and the capture timestamp — is not carried across. Run the result through the image info tool if you want to confirm it, and rename the file too, because filenames leak more than people expect.
Related tools
Why this one doesn't upload your file
There is no server to upload to. This page is a static file, and the work happens in your browser using the same graphics and WebAssembly code that renders every other site you visit. Your file is read from disk into memory, processed, and handed back as a download. Once the page has loaded you can disconnect from the network entirely and it keeps working. The longer explanation