What this actually does
You’ve got a screenshot to share, but it shows an email address, an order number, and a coworker’s face. You don’t want any of that going public. Drag a box over each one, pick how you want it hidden, and download the result. Three boxes, ten seconds, done.
The tool gives you three ways to cover something up. Blackout drops a solid black rectangle, the cleanest option when you want zero ambiguity. Pixelate turns the area into chunky mosaic blocks, the look you’ve seen on TV when a license plate gets hidden. Blur smears the region into a soft haze. You set the strength yourself, so a blur can go from gentle to completely unreadable.
Everything happens on your own machine. The image is loaded into a canvas and painted over right there in the tab. No upload, no server, no copy of your file sitting in someone’s bucket. That matters a lot when the thing you’re hiding is exactly the kind of thing you’d never want leaked.
Drawing the boxes
- Drop your image on the upload area, or click to pick one.
- Choose a style up top: blackout, pixelate, or blur.
- Drag across the part you want gone. A box appears as you drag.
- Add as many boxes as you need. Six faces in a group photo? Draw six.
- Hit Download censored PNG.
Made a mistake? Undo removes the last box, and Clear all wipes the slate. You can switch styles or nudge the strength slider any time before downloading, and the preview updates live so you can see whether the blur is strong enough or the mosaic is too fine.
One thing worth knowing about strength. For pixelate, the number is the block size in pixels, so bigger means coarser and harder to reverse. For blur, it’s the radius, and small text needs a surprisingly heavy blur to truly disappear. When privacy genuinely matters, lean toward blackout or a thick mosaic.
Where people reach for this
Bug reports and support tickets are the classic case. You’re showing a developer the broken checkout page, but the page is full of a real customer’s address. Box it, blur it, send the screenshot without a second thought.
Selling something on a marketplace? Photos of a parcel or an ID often carry a tracking number or document field you’d rather not broadcast. A quick blackout strip handles it.
Then there’s social media. Group photos where one friend didn’t consent to being posted, a notification banner that flashed a private message, a bank balance in the corner of a screen recording still. Pixelate the face, black out the number, keep the rest. Teachers and writers use it the same way, swapping real names out of a student submission or a chat log before sharing it as an example.
A fair warning about blur
Soft blur looks private but sometimes isn’t. Researchers have shown that light Gaussian blur on text can occasionally be reversed, especially when the blurred content has only a few possible values, like a six digit code. If you’re hiding something that truly can’t get out, use blackout. It removes the pixels entirely instead of just scrambling them. Pixelate with a large block size is the next safest. Treat blur as the “good enough for casual sharing” tier, not the bank vault.
Questions people ask
Does my image get uploaded anywhere?
Nope. The whole thing runs in your browser using the canvas API. Your file never touches a network request.
Can I censor more than one spot at once?
Yep, draw as many boxes as you like. Each one gets the current style and strength applied when you export.
Why does it always download a PNG?
PNG is lossless, so the black bars and mosaic blocks stay crisp with no JPEG artifacts bleeding around the edges. Crisp edges also mean nothing accidentally peeks through.
Will the censored area survive if someone zooms in?
For blackout, yes, there’s literally nothing under the black. For pixelate and blur it depends on strength. Crank it up and zooming reveals nothing useful.
Can I use the boxes to redact a PDF page?
Not directly, this works on images. Export your PDF page as a PNG or screenshot it first, censor that, and you’re set.
Does it work on phones?
It’s built for mouse dragging, so a laptop or desktop is the smooth experience. Touch dragging works in most mobile browsers but precise boxes are fiddly on a small screen.