How to blur a face or detail in 3 steps
- Load your photo — drop it above or click to browse. It is never uploaded; all editing happens on your device.
- Draw boxes over what to hide — drag across each face, licence plate, name or document number. Drag a box to move it, or delete it from the list. On some Chrome and Edge browsers an optional "Try auto-detect faces" button also appears — the boxes always stay under your control either way.
- Choose blur or pixelate, then download — adjust the strength, check the protected preview, and save as PNG or JPG.
About blurring photos before you share them
Screenshots and photos travel further than we expect: a class photo reaches a parents' group, a car listing shows the plate outside your home, a document photo reveals an account number. Covering the sensitive parts before sharing is the only safe order — a platform's promise to delete later is no substitute. This tool is deliberately manual: you decide exactly which areas are private, instead of trusting an algorithm to guess. Blur looks smooth and natural for faces in group photos; pixelate (the mosaic effect) is the stronger, more obvious choice for plates, screens and documents, because it destroys detail rather than softening it.
One honest warning: heavy blur on a small, sharp detail can sometimes be partially reversed by determined experts, and pixelation of large text has known limits too. For highly sensitive information — ID numbers, addresses, faces of children in risky situations — the safest choice is a solid cover-up (crop the area out, or cover it with an opaque box in an editor). For everyday sharing, a strong blur or pixelate at a high strength setting is the practical standard used by newsrooms and marketplaces alike.
How it works
The photo is drawn onto a browser canvas. Each box you draw is stored in the photo's own pixel coordinates, so the effect lands in exactly the same place at full resolution. For blur, the photo is redrawn through a blur filter clipped to each box; for pixelate, each boxed area is shrunk to a handful of large blocks and scaled back up with smoothing off, which is what creates the mosaic. The protected preview below the editor is regenerated on every change, and the download is exported at the photo's full original size.
Worked example
A face that measures about 120 px wide in a phone photo, pixelated at the default strength of 18 px, becomes just 120 ÷ 18 ≈ 7 blocks across — far too coarse for features to be recognised. If you can still make out a detail in the preview, drag the strength up: at 30 px the same face is only 4 blocks across.
Frequently asked questions
Is this face blur tool free?
Yes — completely free, with no signup and no limit on how many photos you protect.
Is my photo uploaded or scanned anywhere?
No. Your photo never leaves your device, and the manual box-drawing needs no server at all. The optional auto-detect button, where a browser offers it, also runs entirely on your device using the browser's built-in FaceDetector.
Why do I have to draw the boxes myself?
Because only you know what must stay private — a face, a plate, a house number, a name on a certificate. Manual selection works on every browser, for every kind of detail, and it never misses a face the way automatic detection sometimes does. If your browser supports face detection, you can use the auto-detect button as a starting point and then fix the boxes by hand.
Which is safer, blur or pixelate?
Pixelate at a high strength destroys more information and is the better choice for text, numbers and plates. Blur looks more natural for faces in ordinary photos. For truly sensitive content, cropping the area out entirely is safest of all.
Can someone un-blur my photo afterwards?
The download is a new, flattened image — the original sharp pixels inside the boxes are not stored in it, so casual un-blurring tools have nothing to recover. Extremely determined analysis can sometimes estimate heavily blurred content, which is why the guide above recommends covering or cropping the most sensitive details instead.
Does the tool shrink my photo?
No. The protected image is exported at the photo's full original dimensions, in PNG (lossless) or JPG with the quality slider.
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