Photo Censor

A photo censor lets you hide sensitive regions of a photograph or screenshot before you share it — a face, a licence plate, a home address, a name on an email, a credit-card number in a receipt. You draw rectangles over the regions that need hiding, and each rectangle obscures the pixels underneath. Journalists, product managers preparing bug- report screenshots, HR teams redacting interview notes, and parents posting photos of their children all use some form of this tool daily.

Three redaction modes, each with trade-offs. Blur smooths the region using a Gaussian blur filter — visually pleasing, preserves context (you can still tell a face is there), and stylistically matches how news photos censor bystanders. But blur is not secure: for text especially, a blurred image can sometimes be reconstructed with enough effort. Pixelate replaces the region with a coarse grid of averaged colour blocks — more obviously redacted, slightly more resistant to reconstruction, but still not a security guarantee. Black bar fills the region with solid black — the only option that is cryptographically secure, because there are no original pixels left to recover.

Rule of thumb. For casual use (friends in a birthday photo who did not consent to being online), blur is fine. For personal-data redaction (licence plates, badge numbers, anything read by a computer), use pixelate or black bar. For cryptographic-grade redaction (anything legal, financial, medical, or involving minors), use a black bar. Never rely on blur or pixelate for information whose exposure would harm you or another person — adversaries with motivation and tools have recovered text from both, especially at low blur strengths or when multiple blurred frames of the same text exist.

How our censor works. Drop an image and draw rectangles with your mouse or finger. Each rectangle takes a mode — blur, pixelate, or black bar — and persists in a list you can edit later. Drag a rectangle to reposition it, change its mode via the sidebar dropdown, or delete it with the trash icon. When you are done, export as PNG. The export renders at the image's native resolution so the censor boxes preserve their protective effect when zoomed.

Privacy: all processing happens in your browser. The image you drop is never uploaded, never cached server-side, never logged. This matters especially for the category of photo you would want to censor in the first place.

1. Drop the image into the dropzone.
2. Pick a default mode — blur, pixelate, or black bar.
3. Drag rectangles over the regions to hide.
4. Adjust modes or positions in the sidebar list.
5. Download PNG at native resolution.

• Three censor modes — blur, pixelate, black bar.
• Click-drag to draw, drag existing boxes to reposition.
• Per-box mode — mix blur, pixelate, and black bar on the same image.
• Adjustable blur strength and pixel size.
• Exports at native resolution so zoom does not reveal redacted pixels.
• Runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.