How it works
The Privacy Blur tool lets you draw one or more rectangular or oval selection zones over an image and apply a strong Gaussian blur to those areas. Use it to redact faces, license plates, ID numbers, addresses, personal information, or any visual content before sharing screenshots or photos publicly.
Before posting a screenshot of a conversation, document, or interface that contains other people's names, email addresses, phone numbers, or photos, blurring the sensitive areas is the responsible practice. Privacy Blur makes this possible in seconds without needing to open Photoshop or GIMP.
How to use it: upload your image. Click and drag to draw a blur zone over the area to redact. Repeat for additional areas. Adjust the blur strength (5 = light frost, 20 = heavy obscurement, 50 = unrecognizable). Toggle between rectangular and oval selection shapes. Click Apply and Download.
Blur strength guide: strength 10–15 blurs details enough to be unreadable. Strength 20–30 makes the region heavily obscured. Strength 40+ makes the region almost entirely abstract — use this for face blurring in shared screenshots.
Face detection: the tool includes optional automatic face detection (using a local browser-based model) that highlights detected faces for one-click blurring. The detection model runs in WebAssembly on your device.
Why not crop instead: cropping removes the context around the sensitive area, sometimes making the image confusing. Blurring retains the surrounding context (e.g., you can still see the layout of a conversation) while obscuring only the specific private content.
Privacy: the blur computation and any face detection run entirely in your browser. No image is uploaded.
Frequently Asked Questions
- For casual privacy (sharing a screenshot with a friend, posting on social media), yes — a blur radius of 15+ makes text and faces unrecognizable. For high-security redaction (legal documents, official disclosures), use opaque black rectangles, not blur. Research has shown that very light blur can sometimes be reversed by AI deblurring algorithms on text with known character sets.
- Yes — enable the auto face detection toggle. The tool uses a browser-based face detection model to find and highlight faces. Click any detected face to apply blur with one click. You can still manually draw additional blur zones for any undetected regions.
- Draw the first blur zone over the area you want to redact. Click Apply to commit it, which makes that area permanently blurred in the canvas. Then draw another zone over the next area. Repeat for all areas. Clicking Download exports the image with all applied blur zones.
- For small text (12–14pt at screen resolution), a blur radius of 8–10 makes it unreadable. For larger text or high-resolution screenshots, use radius 15–20. For faces, radius 12–20 is sufficient for casual privacy. For absolute redaction, use the maximum available radius (50+) or replace the region with a solid black rectangle.