Your file never leaves this browser

Black out part of a picture

Drag a box over anything that should not be shared — a face, an address, an account number — and it is replaced in the saved file. Solid fill is the default on purpose: blur and pixelation are built from averages of the original pixels, so they keep information about what was underneath and, for text especially, can be worked back. The picture is handled here on your own machine, and the metadata is dropped along the way.

Drop your picture here

JPG, PNG, WEBP · stays on your device

Drag on the picture to mark what should go.

Questions

Why is solid fill the default rather than blur?

Because blur and pixelation do not remove the information, they average it. Every blurred block is derived from the pixels it covers, so the original is narrowed down rather than destroyed, and where the content is predictable — text in a common typeface, a number in a fixed field — candidates can be generated, blurred the same way and compared until one matches. Solid fill has nothing to work back from: the pixels are replaced with a flat colour and what was there is not in the file in any form.

Is the original hidden anywhere else in the file?

Not after this. Photographs carry an embedded thumbnail inside their metadata, and that thumbnail is a copy of the picture as it was — there are well-known cases of an image being edited while the thumbnail kept the original view. Here the file is rebuilt from the pixels alone, so the thumbnail, the GPS position and the camera details all go rather than being carried across.

Can I still see what I covered?

Not in the saved file. Your original on disk is untouched — this produces a new file — so keep the original somewhere safe if you need it, and share only the new one. There is no way to reverse the covering from the downloaded picture, which is the point.

Does it work on a large photo?

Yes. The picture is displayed scaled down to fit the screen, but the covering is applied at full resolution — the box you drew is converted to real pixel coordinates before anything is drawn. That conversion is the part that goes wrong in tools that cover the wrong area, so it is tested separately.

Questions

Why is solid fill the default rather than blur?

Because blur and pixelation do not remove the information, they average it. Every blurred block is derived from the pixels it covers, so the original is narrowed down rather than destroyed, and where the content is predictable — text in a common typeface, a number in a fixed field — candidates can be generated, blurred the same way and compared until one matches. Solid fill has nothing to work back from: the pixels are replaced with a flat colour and what was there cannot be recovered from the file in any form.

Is the original hidden anywhere else in the file?

Not after this. Photographs carry an embedded thumbnail inside their metadata, and that thumbnail is a copy of the picture as it was — there are well-known cases of an image being edited while the thumbnail kept the original view. Here the file is rebuilt from the pixels alone, so the thumbnail, the GPS position and the camera details all go rather than being carried across.

Can I still see what I covered?

Not in the saved file. Your original on disk is untouched — this produces a new file — so keep the original somewhere safe if you need it, and share only the new one. There is no way to reverse the covering from the downloaded picture, which is the point.

Does it work on a large photo?

Yes. The picture is displayed scaled down to fit the screen, but the covering is applied at full resolution — the box you drew is converted to real pixel coordinates before anything is drawn. That conversion is the part that goes wrong in tools that cover the wrong area, so it is tested separately.

Other images tools

Everything here is free and works the same way — in your browser.