Blur faces in a photo before you share it
Find the faces in a photo, cover them with a solid block or heavy pixelation, and add boxes by hand for number plates, name tags or house numbers. The photo never leaves your device.
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How it works
Find the faces in a photo, cover them with a solid block or heavy pixelation, and add boxes by hand for number plates, name tags or house numbers. The photo never leaves your device.
Photos of protests, school events, accidents, street incidents and crowds identify people who never agreed to be posted. This tool runs Google's MediaPipe face detector (the BlazeFace full-range model) in your browser with WebAssembly: it looks at the whole photo and then at overlapping close-up tiles, so small faces at the back of a group are found more often. Every face gets a box, padded outwards to take in hair and ears. Tap a box to leave that face visible, or use Add box to cover anything the detector doesn't look for: number plates, name badges, school logos, tattoos, house numbers, street signs. Solid block is the default because it replaces the pixels outright; nothing of the face is left in the file. Heavy pixelate uses about six blocks across each face and then blurs them. Light blurs and fine mosaics, the kind many apps use, can sometimes be sharpened or matched back to a face, so use Solid when it matters who someone is. The limits are real: the detector misses faces that are very small, far away, in profile, turned away, motion-blurred, in shadow, or partly hidden by masks, hands or hats, and it can box things that aren't faces. Check the whole preview before you post. The saved photo is redrawn from its pixels as a new JPEG (or PNG for PNG input), so GPS location, capture time and camera details are dropped too. The detector (~12 MB) downloads once on first use and is then cached. It needs WebGL, which almost every browser has switched on.
How to use it
- Drop your photo. Faces are found on your device in a few seconds. The first use downloads the detector once (~12 MB).
- Check every box. Tap a box to leave that face visible, and use Add box for missed faces, plates, name tags or house numbers.
- Save the covered copy. Choose Solid block (safest) or Heavy pixelate and download. Location and camera data are left out of the new file.
Frequently asked questions
- Is my photo uploaded to detect the faces?
- No. The face detector runs in your browser. Only the detector's code and model are downloaded, the first time; your photo is never sent anywhere.
- Will it find every face?
- No, and no detector does. Small, distant, side-on, blurred or partly covered faces can be missed. Look over the preview and use Add box for any it missed, plus plates, name tags and house numbers, which it never looks for.
- Is blurring a face safe enough?
- A light blur often isn't: software can sharpen it, or match it against photos of known people. Solid block leaves nothing to recover, which is why it's the default. Heavy pixelate is much coarser than a normal blur but still less certain than Solid.
- Does it remove the location from the photo too?
- Yes. The saved copy is a fresh image drawn from the pixels, so EXIF data such as GPS coordinates, capture time and camera model is not carried over.
- Can I blur number plates and house numbers?
- Yes, by hand. Tap Add box and drag over the plate, sign or number. On a computer you can drag a box straight away.