Blur Faces in Photos

A photo you post carries more than the person you meant to show. Bystanders, children, a colleague's badge, a licence plate at the kerb, a delivery label on a box — all of it is published with the picture, and once it is indexed it does not come back. Hiding those details before the photo leaves your device is the only version of this that actually works, and it takes a few seconds.

What this protects

• Bystanders: people in the background of your holiday, protest or event photos never agreed to appear.
• Children: faces of children in school, sports and family pictures shared with a wider audience.
• Identifiers: licence plates, house numbers, name badges, signatures and screens full of private data.
• Sources and witnesses: people whose safety depends on not being recognisable in a published image.
• Your location: GPS coordinates and camera details ride along inside the original file and are dropped on export.

Hide faces, licence plates and other private details in a photo, on your own device.

1. 1Add your photo: Drop in a JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF, BMP, AVIF or SVG. It stays on your device.
2. 2Detect the faces: Press Detect faces. Every face found gets an oval region over it, which you can adjust or delete.
3. 3Cover anything else: Drag a box, an oval, a freehand stroke or a polygon over plates, badges, signatures or screens.
4. 4Choose how to hide it: Blur softens; mosaic and block destroy the pixels; emoji covers them. Set the strength and edge softness.
5. 5Save the result: Press Hide the regions, then download a PNG, JPG or WebP. Location and camera data are dropped.

Press Detect faces and a compact detection model runs on your own device, placing an oval region over every face it finds. Each one is an ordinary region afterwards: move it, resize it, change how it hides, or delete it if it caught a statue instead of a person. Padding grows every detected box a little, because a detector aims at the face and misses the hair and the chin.

Detection is available on the free plan, because a face blur tool that cannot find faces is not the tool. Pro changes how hard it looks: the free plan examines the picture once, Pro examines it five times — the whole frame plus four overlapping quadrants — which is what finds the small, distant faces in a crowd. Measured on a seven-person group photo reduced to a quarter of its size, one pass found none of them and five found six.

A Gaussian blur is a reversible operation. It smooths pixels together rather than removing them, and given the shape of the blur an attacker can push a great deal of the original detail back out. That is fine for taking a face out of the foreground of a holiday snap and it is not enough when the point is anonymity.

• Blur: soft and natural-looking. Best when the goal is to draw attention away from someone, not to make them unidentifiable.
• Mosaic: averages each block down to one colour and throws the rest away. The information is gone, not smoothed.
• Block: a flat colour of your choosing. Nothing survives, and it is obvious to a reader that something was deliberately removed.
• Emoji: covers the region with a glyph. Popular for social posts, and as final as a block.

Strength is measured against each region's own size rather than in fixed pixels, so one setting is correct for a close-up portrait and for a face forty pixels across in a crowd. A fixed radius cannot be both: ten pixels erases the small face and does nothing at all to the large one.

Detection only looks for faces, and plenty of what needs hiding is not one. Four shapes cover the rest: a box for a screen or a document, an oval for a head the detector missed, a freehand stroke for a signature or a route on a map, and a polygon for an awkward outline like a tattoo or a shop sign. Every region carries its own way of hiding, so a face can be blurred while the licence plate beside it is blacked out in the same pass.

• Box: drag a rectangle. The fastest shape for plates, badges, screens and address labels.
• Oval: the shape a head actually is, so less of the background is covered for the same protection.
• Freehand: drag a stroke of any path — signatures, handwriting, a line on a map.
• Polygon: click each corner, then close the shape. For outlines nothing else fits.

The photo is read, redacted and saved entirely on your device. No copy is sent anywhere, which is the part that matters when the file is exactly the sort of thing you do not want on someone else's server. It also means there is no queue and no retention policy to read.

The export is a freshly encoded image, so the EXIF block from the original — GPS coordinates, camera model, the timestamp — is not carried across. That is worth as much as the blur itself: a redacted photo that still says precisely where it was taken has not really been redacted.

• Blur part of an image

  Background blur, tilt-shift and lens blur across a whole photo.

• Crop an image

  Cut a person out of the frame instead of hiding them.

• Compress an image

  Bring a photo under the free size cap before redacting it.

• Remove the background

  Separate the subject from everything behind them.