Blur or black out a photo

This tool hides parts of a photo or screenshot before you share it: draw a box, choose pixelate, blur or a solid black cover, and download a clean copy. It runs in your browser. The image never leaves your device, and the downloaded file carries no location, camera or date metadata.

When you need to redact a photo

Most leaks in images are not in the metadata. They are in the picture itself:

• Screenshots of chats, bank apps or emails, with names, account numbers, phone numbers and the time at the top.
• Photos of documents: an ID, a boarding pass with its barcode, a delivery label with your address.
• Faces of people who didn't agree to be posted, children in the background, a colleague on a video call.
• Things around you: a house number, a car plate, a street sign, a badge, a screen behind you.

A box over the right area takes ten seconds and removes the problem before the file goes anywhere.

How to use it

1. Choose a photo or screenshot with the button above, or drop it on the page on a computer.
2. Pick an effect, then drag over what you want to hide. Draw as many boxes as you need.
3. Tap a box to select it: drag to move, use the corner to resize, change its effect, or delete it. Undo and Redo work for every step.
4. Choose JPG or PNG and download. Your original file is not changed.

On a keyboard: with the image focused, arrow keys move the selected box, Shift with arrow keys resizes it, and Delete removes it.

Pixelate, blur or black box: which one?

Two habits make redaction hold up:

• Cover more than the text itself. Leave no first or last character peeking out, and include the line height, since partial letter shapes give away a lot.
• Look at the whole image. The same number often appears twice in a screenshot, once in a title and once in the body. Reflections in glasses and windows count too.

The Strong setting uses bigger blocks for pixelate and a heavier blur. It is the right choice for faces in small photos, where light settings can leave them recognizable.

Automatic face detection, where your browser has it

Some browsers have face detection built in. When yours does, a Find faces button appears and adds a box over every face it finds, with a margin around it. It runs on your device like the rest of the tool; we don't download a recognition model and we don't send the image anywhere. When your browser doesn't offer it, the button simply isn't there and you draw the boxes yourself, which is also the most reliable method.

Treat automatic boxes as a first pass. Faces in profile, small faces in a crowd, and faces partly covered by hair or hands are often missed.

What the downloaded file contains

The copy you download is redrawn pixel by pixel from what you see in the editor, then saved as a new JPG or PNG. That has two effects:

• No hidden layers. There is no "undo" stored in the file and no original underneath the box. The covered area is just the new pixels.
• No metadata. GPS position, capture date, phone model and editing history don't make it into the copy. To check any file yourself, open it in the photo metadata viewer; to strip metadata from photos you don't need to edit, use the EXIF remover.

Very large photos are edited at up to about 16 megapixels, the most a phone browser can reliably hold in memory. The tool tells you when it scales one down.

Redacting on iPhone without a tool

iOS has a built-in way to cover parts of an image. In Photos, open the image, tap Edit, then the Markup button. Pick the pen, set the opacity to full, and draw over the area, or add a filled black shape from the plus menu. Markup on a screenshot works the same way from the thumbnail that appears after you take it.

It works, with two caveats: a semi-transparent highlighter can leave text readable, and an edit made in Photos stays reversible in Photos until you export a copy. If you send the edited photo from the share sheet, turn off Location under Options as well. Our guide on how to share photos privately covers what each sharing method keeps.

When the photo itself is the sensitive part

Redaction is for photos you mean to share. Some photos shouldn't be shared at all: an ID document, a medical photo, a page of notes. For those, sigil. keeps them in an encrypted vault on your phone that opens only with a sign you draw on a 5×5 grid, with no account and no server. Its private camera takes photos that never touch the Camera Roll, and metadata is stripped when photos come in and when they go out. For journalists handling material from sources, see journalists and sources.