Blur Image Area
Hide a face, a number plate or an address in a picture.
Everything runs inside your browser. Your files never leave your device.
Drop your files here
.jpg, .jpeg, .png, .webp, .gif, .bmp, .avif · they stay on this device
Ask about Blur Image Area
Questions about what this tool does, which option to pick, or what it can and cannot handle.
The question you type here is sent to an AI provider to be answered — your files and whatever you put in the tool above are not, and the assistant cannot see them. Answers are generated and can be wrong. The tool itself is not guessing: it runs deterministic code on your device.
About the Blur Image Area
Publishing a screenshot means publishing everything in it. An email address in a sidebar, a customer name in a list, a token in a URL bar, a colleague's face in the background. Obscuring those parts before the picture goes anywhere is a small step that prevents an irreversible one.
This blurs or pixelates a region you draw over the image, and it does it destructively — the pixels underneath are replaced, not covered. That distinction is the whole point of using a tool like this rather than drawing a black rectangle in a document.
A rectangle drawn over text in a PDF or a presentation is an object sitting on a layer, and the text beneath it is still in the file. Moving the rectangle, or extracting the content, recovers what it was hiding. That failure has embarrassed government departments, law firms and newspapers, repeatedly and publicly. Here the region is rewritten in the image data, and there is nothing underneath to recover.
Pixelation deserves a caution that blurring does not. A heavily pixelated region of known text — a card number, a postcode, a name from a limited set — can sometimes be reversed by generating candidates and pixelating each until one matches. Blurring at a strong radius destroys more information and is the safer choice for anything that matters. For a face, either works; for a short string with predictable structure, blur.
Do the obscuring before the image is shared rather than after. Once a file has been sent, edited copies do not recall the original, and the version that matters is the one that already arrived.
How to use it
- 1Drop in the screenshot or photograph.
- 2Draw over each region that needs hiding. Several areas can be marked on one image.
- 3Choose blur rather than pixelation for short predictable text such as a card number or a postcode.
- 4Turn the strength up further than looks necessary, then download and check the result at full size.
Questions
- Can the blurred content be recovered?
- Not from a strong blur — the information is genuinely destroyed in the pixel data. Heavy pixelation of predictable text is weaker, since candidates can be generated and compared. Use blur when the hidden text has a known format.
- Why not just draw a black box in a document?
- Because in most document formats the box is an object on top and the content is still underneath, recoverable by moving it or extracting the text. This rewrites the pixels, so there is nothing left below.
- How strong should the blur be?
- Stronger than looks necessary. If the shape of the letters is still discernible, the radius is too low. There is no cost to overdoing it.
- Is the image uploaded?
- No. It is decoded onto a canvas here and the blur is applied in this tab, which matters more than usual given that the whole reason you are here is that the picture contains something sensitive.