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Blur an Image — Free

Drag over a face, a number plate or a name to hide it — or blur the whole picture. Blur, pixelate or block out completely, in your browser, with nothing uploaded.

Drop an image here

or choose one from your device. JPG, PNG and WebP.

Your image never leaves this device. Everything happens in your browser.

Most people who want to blur an image are not after a soft-focus effect. They are about to post a screenshot with an email address in the corner, or a photo with someone else's child in the background, or a picture of a car whose plate is perfectly legible. The job is to hide one part of the picture and leave the rest alone.

So that is what this does: drag a box over anything you want gone, add as many boxes as you need, and pick how thoroughly to hide it. The result is rendered from the original at full resolution rather than exported from the preview, which matters — a preview-sized export would hand you a smaller image than you thought you were getting.

One thing worth saying plainly, because most tools do not. A blur is not a shredder. It reduces detail rather than destroying it, and researchers have reconstructed text from weakly blurred and pixelated images where the content was predictable — digits on a plate, characters in a known font. For anything that genuinely matters, use the solid block. It paints over the area outright, so there is nothing left to recover, and no cleverness can get it back.

How to blur part of an image

  1. 1. Open your image

    Drag it onto the drop zone or choose it from your device. Nothing is uploaded — everything happens in your browser.

  2. 2. Drag over what you want hidden

    Draw a box across a face, a number plate, an address bar or a name. Add as many as you need, and undo the last one or clear them all. Or switch to blurring the whole image.

  3. 3. Choose how to hide it

    Blur looks natural, pixelation reads clearly as deliberate, and a solid block covers completely. Set the strength, or pick a colour for the block.

  4. 4. Apply and download

    Press Apply and the edited image downloads straight away, rendered from the original at full resolution — not from the preview.

Which mask should you use?

They look similar and protect very differently. Pick by how much it would cost you if someone recovered what is underneath.

Frequently asked questions

How do I blur part of an image for free? +

Open the image above and drag a box across whatever you want hidden. Add as many boxes as you need, choose blur, pixelation or a solid block, then press Apply and download. There is no account and no watermark, and the image is never uploaded.

Is a blur enough to hide something sensitive? +

Often not, and this is worth knowing before you rely on it. Blurring and pixelation reduce detail rather than remove it — the underlying pixels leave a statistical trace, and weak settings applied to predictable content like digits on a number plate or characters in a familiar font have been reconstructed by researchers. If what you are hiding actually matters — an account number, an address, a name — use the solid block option. It paints over the area completely, so there is nothing left to recover.

How do I blur a face in a photo? +

Drag a box over the face and choose blur or pixelation. Make the box a little larger than the face itself, since a tight crop can leave identifiable edges — hair, jaw line, ears — just outside it. For a photo you are publishing rather than sharing privately, a strong setting or a solid block is the safer choice.

How do I hide a number plate? +

Draw a box over the plate and use a solid block, or pixelation at a strong setting. Plates are exactly the case where a light blur is unreliable: the character set is small and the font is known, which is what makes weak blurs recoverable. A block removes the question entirely.

What is the difference between blur, pixelate and block? +

Blur softens the area smoothly and looks the most natural, but is the weakest as concealment. Pixelation replaces the area with coarse squares, which is unmistakably deliberate and harder to read, though still a reduction rather than a removal. A solid block paints over the region in a colour you choose — it destroys the content outright, which makes it the only one that genuinely cannot be undone.

Can I blur the whole image instead? +

Yes. Switch "What to mask" to the whole image and set the strength. That is the option for softening a photo to use as a background, or for making a screenshot unreadable in a preview while keeping its shape and colours.

Does the download match what I see in the preview? +

Yes, and it is rendered at full resolution rather than exported from the preview. The preview is a scaled-down version drawn through exactly the same code path, with the blur radius scaled to match, so what you see is what you get — but the file you download is cut from the original image at its real size.

Does this remove the photo's location data too? +

Yes, as a side effect of saving. The image is redrawn from raw pixels and re-encoded, which does not carry EXIF across, so camera details, timestamps and GPS coordinates are not present in the output. That matters when redacting: a photo with the faces blurred but the coordinates intact still says exactly where it was taken.

Are my images uploaded anywhere? +

No. The image is read, masked and re-encoded entirely inside your browser, and nothing is transmitted. For a redaction tool that is the point — uploading a photo to a stranger's server in order to hide something on it would defeat the exercise. Once the page has loaded it works offline.

Will there be a watermark on the result? +

No. The output is your image with the areas you chose masked, nothing else added. There is no watermark, no badge, and no paid tier that removes one.

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