Blur the faces in a photo
Find every face and cover it, without the picture leaving this tab.
Your file
Drop a file here, or click to choose
It stays on this device. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Settings
The one tool you really should not upload for
Think about what a face-blurring website asks of you. To protect the identity of the people in a photo, you hand the original, unblurred photo to a stranger's server, along with your IP address and the time you sent it. If the picture is of a protest, a child, a colleague, or someone who never asked to be in it, that is the opposite of what you were trying to do.
Here the detector runs in this tab. Your browser opens the photo from your disk and it goes nowhere else.
Which cover to choose
- A solid block is the only one that is genuinely irreversible. The pixels underneath are gone.
- A blur is strong at the settings here, and fine for keeping a face out of a screenshot.
- Pixels look like the television version of anonymity, and they are the weakest of the three. Researchers have repeatedly recovered recognisable faces from pixelated images, because a coarse grid of averages still carries a lot. Use it for the look, not for safety.
If someone's identity genuinely matters, use the block.
Check the result before you rely on it
Detection is good on faces looking roughly at the camera and weaker on profiles, faces at the edge of the frame, faces behind glass or a mask, and anyone small in a crowd. Look at the output and confirm that every face you meant to cover actually is. If one was missed, turn "how hard to look" up to thorough and run it again, or crop rather than publish and hope.
A face is also not the only thing that identifies someone. A name badge, a house number, a number plate, a reflection, or simply the clothing and setting can be enough for anyone who already knows them. Covering the face is one step, not the whole job.
Covering a face does not touch the rest of the file either. The GPS coordinates and the timestamp are still in there, so follow up with remove metadata before the photo goes anywhere public.
Common questions
Did it find every face?
Check and see. Profiles, partly hidden faces and small faces in a crowd are the usual misses. This is a detector, not a guarantee, and the consequence of a miss lands on you rather than on it.
Can the blur be undone?
A solid block cannot be: the pixels are gone. A strong blur is not practically reversible either. Pixelation is the weak one, and has been defeated in published research, so do not lean on it when it matters.
It covered something that is not a face.
Set how hard to look to strict. The detector looks for a face-shaped arrangement of features, and occasionally an animal or a pattern qualifies.
Does it work on video?
Not yet. Video needs the faces found again on every frame and tracked between them, which is a different job from a single picture. This tool handles stills.
Does it affect the rest of the picture?
No. Saved as PNG, every pixel outside the covered boxes is bit for bit what it was. Saving as JPEG re-compresses the whole image, as saving any JPEG does.