Blur / Censor Image

How to blur out private details in a photo

1. Drop a JPG, PNG or WebP onto the box above. The picture appears with the controls underneath it.
2. Pick a Censor style — heavy blur, a pixel mosaic or a solid black bar — and set the Strength slider anywhere between 1 and 10.
3. Drag a box over each thing you want hidden. Drag again to add another area; there is no limit on how many you add.
4. Use Undo last region to remove the most recent box, or Clear all regions to start over. Changing the style or the strength updates every area at once.
5. Press Download Censored Image to save the result as yourfile-censored.jpg.

What people use it for

Most of the time this is about sharing evidence of something without sharing everything around it.

• Hiding the faces of children, colleagues or bystanders before a photo goes on social media or into a newsletter.
• Covering an account number, sort code or card number on a photographed statement or receipt sent to support.
• Blanking a home address, a signature or a date of birth on a scanned document or an ID.
• Obscuring a licence plate in a photo of a car for sale or of a parking incident.
• Removing names, email addresses and message previews from a screenshot before it goes into a bug report.

Good to know

The important point is that the censoring is destructive by design. The blurred, pixelated or blacked-out pixels are rewritten in the exported copy, so there is nothing underneath left to recover. That is quite different from drawing a black rectangle in a PDF reader, a word processor or a slide tool, where the shape is a separate object sitting on top of intact text or image data that anyone can move, delete or copy out — files censored that way have caused real leaks. Here your original stays untouched on your disk and a new file is produced with the hidden areas genuinely gone.

Two practical cautions. Choose a strong enough setting: light pixelation over small printed digits can sometimes still be guessed at, so solid black is the safer option for account numbers and other short strings. And cover the whole item, edges included — the regions are applied at the image's full original resolution, so what you draw on the preview is exactly what gets applied. A censoring tool that transmitted your uncensored original would rather defeat its own purpose, which is why every pixel is redrawn by your own browser and nothing reaches a server. If you would sooner cut the sensitive part off entirely, Crop Image does that, and Compress Image can shrink the censored copy before you send it.

Questions people ask

Can the blur be reversed?

Not from the exported file. The detail is discarded when the new image is written, so there is no hidden layer to peel off and no original pixels to restore.

Blur, pixelate or black — which should I use?

Solid black for anything short and guessable, such as numbers and codes. Heavy blur or pixelation looks less harsh on faces and backgrounds, where the aim is only to remove recognisability.

Does the image keep its full resolution?

Yes. You draw on a scaled preview, but the regions are mapped back onto the original and applied at its native size, so nothing is shrunk on the way out.

Can I censor a PDF this way?

Not directly — this tool works on image files. A common route is to export or photograph the page, censor it here, then rebuild a PDF from the result with JPG to PDF.