Blur / Pixelate Tool

The Blur/Pixelate Tool lets you drag a selection box over any part of an image and pixelate or blur just that region — the standard technique for redacting a face, a license plate, a phone number, or any other sensitive detail in a screenshot before you post it publicly. Everything outside the selected box stays completely untouched.

This comes up constantly: blurring a coworker's face out of a screenshot before sharing it in a support ticket, pixelating a license plate in a photo posted online, covering an account number visible in a banking app screenshot, or redacting a name in a document photo. Manually editing this in a full image editor is overkill for a one-off redaction — this tool does exactly that one job, with a draggable box and two effect modes to choose from.

Pixelate works by shrinking just the selected region down to a tiny grid of large blocky pixels and then scaling it back up with no smoothing, which destroys the fine detail needed to recognize a face or read text while leaving a clearly intentional, unmistakably redacted block. Blur instead applies a Gaussian-style blur filter to just that region, which softens detail more gradually — visually gentler, but at low blur strength it can sometimes still leave text partially readable, so pixelation is the safer choice when the goal is guaranteed unreadability rather than a stylistic effect.

Both effects render on an HTML5 canvas locally in your browser, with the image never uploaded anywhere. One important caveat for genuinely sensitive redactions: always redact directly in the exported image (as this tool does) rather than covering something with an unrelated overlay in a different app, and pick pixelation over a light blur if the content absolutely must not be reconstructable — a low-strength blur has occasionally been reverse-engineered in security research, while a low-resolution pixelation destroys the underlying detail outright.