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Blur faces in a photo

Hide children, strangers and anyone who did not agree to be posted. Mark each face and download; the photo stays on your device.

Blur faces in a photo before you post it: mark each face, set the strength, download. It is free, needs no account and adds no watermark, and your files are not uploaded: everything runs in your browser on your device. Finding faces downloads a small face detector (about 4 MB) the first time you use that button; marking areas by hand needs no download. After your first run the page works offline.

Drop the photo with faces to bluror click to choose a file.

    For text such as card numbers or addresses, use Black box: blurred or pixelated text can sometimes be read back.

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    Your files are processed on this device and never sent to a server. Reload the page to clear everything from memory.

    School events, team photos, a protest, a street scene with strangers in the background: before a photo goes on social media or into a newsletter, the faces of people who did not agree to be posted often need to go. Many parents blur their children’s faces on public accounts, and schools and clubs ask for it when some families opt out. The irony of most face-blurring websites is that they want the unblurred photo uploaded to their server first.

    Here the photo opens in your browser and stays there. As soon as it loads, a face detector running in the page marks every face it can see; drag a box over any it missed. The blur appears straight away, and each box has a × in its corner to remove it. On a phone, drag with one finger. The blur reads the pixels around each box so the edge fades into the photo instead of looking like a pasted rectangle.

    For a face that must not be recognised at all, push Strength up until the preview shows only a soft patch of skin tone, or switch the effect to Pixelate or Black box. Hair, a distinctive jacket or a name badge can identify someone as surely as a face, so cover those too. The saved photo is written without its location and camera data, which a posted photo of children should not carry anyway.

    How it works

    1. Drop the photo, or tap to pick it from your camera roll.
    2. Wait a moment while every face is found and boxed, then drag across any face it missed. Check none is missed, and raise Strength until nobody is recognisable in the preview.
    3. Save the photo. It downloads at full resolution, ready to post.

    In your browser, not on a server

    Your browser decodes the photo (libheif or the Squoosh decoders step in for HEIC, AVIF and JPEG XL) and draws it on a canvas in your tab. Each area you mark is pixelated by averaging blocks of pixels, blurred by three passes of a box blur that reads the pixels around the area so the edge blends in, or filled with solid black. The same code draws the preview and the full-size file, which is encoded once in the format you chose. Find faces runs Google’s MediaPipe face detector (Apache-2.0) as WebAssembly in your tab, loaded from this site only when you press the button.

    Compared with upload-based tools: The photos people blur are the ones that should not be uploaded: a child’s face, a car’s number plate, a bank screenshot, an ID card. Online blur tools and editors take the unblurred original onto their server first, and several ask for an account before the download. Here the original never leaves your device.

    Verify it yourself. Give the page a short while after your first run to save itself for offline use, then turn off Wi-Fi or switch to airplane mode and run the tool again. Or open your browser's developer tools (F12, or Cmd-Option-I on a Mac), pick the Network tab, and watch it while you convert. The panel above does the same count for you.

    Questions

    Does it find faces automatically?

    Yes. As soon as the photo loads, a small face detector (Google’s MediaPipe, about 4 MB the first time) runs inside this tab and marks every face it sees, including small ones in a group photo. It can still miss a face that is turned away, covered or tiny, and a missed face in a photo of children is the mistake that matters, so check the preview and drag across anything it left.

    Can I blur faces on my phone?

    Yes. Open the page in Safari or Chrome, pick the photo from your camera roll, and drag a finger across each face. The photo is processed on the phone and saved back through the browser’s download.

    Is blur enough, or should I use pixelate?

    Both work for faces when the strength is high enough that you cannot tell who it is. A strong blur looks softer and less jarring in a group photo; pixelation reads more clearly as deliberately hidden.

    Is the file uploaded anywhere?

    No. There is no server in this process. The page is a static file and the work is done by code running inside your browser tab. Give the page a short while after your first run to save itself for offline use; then you can turn off Wi-Fi and it still works.

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