Turn a photo into blocks
Drop an image, drag one slider, and the whole picture breaks into chunky squares. That’s it. The slider sets the block size, from a fine 2px grain all the way up to 48px tiles that flatten a face into a handful of colored rectangles. Low numbers keep things recognizable with a soft, low-res look. Crank it and the subject dissolves into a mosaic.
Here’s the trick under the hood. The image gets shrunk down to a tiny version where each block becomes a single pixel, then scaled back up to full size with smoothing turned off. No averaging, no soft edges, just hard squares. It’s the same approach video editors use for the classic “blurred face on the news” effect, except this one keeps clean edges instead of mush.
Using it
- Upload your image, or drag it onto the drop area.
- Slide Block size until the preview looks right.
- Click Download pixelated PNG.
The preview reflects your real image resolution, not a scaled-down guess, so what you see is what the exported file actually looks like. A 12px block on a 4000px-wide photo looks very different from 12px on a 400px thumbnail, and the tool accounts for that. Pick the effect, not a number you have to mentally convert.
Output is always PNG. Pixelation produces sharp, flat-colored squares, and PNG keeps those edges crisp. Save it as a JPEG and you’d get faint ringing artifacts around every block boundary. Not the look you want.
Why people pixelate
Censoring faces and plates. Group photo where one person didn’t agree to be posted? A 24px block over the face does the job. Same for license plates, house numbers, or a name badge caught in the background.
Retro and game art. Pixel-art aesthetics, 8-bit album covers, that deliberately-lo-fi avatar. Big blocks on a clean source image give you an instant retro mosaic without firing up a sprite editor.
Low-res placeholders. Building a lazy-loading gallery and want a blurry stand-in while the full image downloads? A heavily pixelated copy is tiny, loads instantly, and hints at the final picture. Drop the sharp version in on load.
Hiding text and numbers. Order IDs, email addresses, a balance in the corner of a screenshot. Big blocks scramble them past reading.
Pixelate vs blur for hiding things
Reach for pixelation, not blur, when you’re actually trying to hide something. Here’s the honest reason. A heavy blur looks private, but certain blurs are reversible: if the hidden content has only a few possible values (think a 6-digit code or a known font), researchers have shown that some blur effects can be computationally undone to recover the original. Pixelation with a large block throws away the detail outright. Each square is one flat color averaged from everything underneath, and there’s no math that reconstructs what those pixels used to be.
So for casual softening, blur is fine and looks nicer. For “this must not leak,” use a big block size here, or a solid blackout if you want zero ambiguity. The chunkier the block, the less there is to recover.
One caveat: tiny blocks don’t hide much. A 2px or 4px grain still leaves a readable shape. If privacy is the point, push the slider well up so a face becomes four or five squares, not forty.
Common questions
Does my image get uploaded?
Nope. Everything runs in your browser on a canvas. The file never hits a server, which is the whole point when you’re hiding something sensitive.
What block size should I use to hide a face?
Depends on how big the face is in the frame, but a good rule is to make the whole face only four to eight blocks wide. On most photos that lands somewhere around 20 to 40px. Check the preview and bump it up until features disappear.
Can I un-pixelate an image later?
Not from the exported PNG. The downscale step discards the original detail for good. Keep your source file if you’ll need the sharp version again.
Why PNG and not JPG?
PNG keeps the block edges razor sharp. JPEG compression adds faint halos around hard color boundaries, which muddies the clean mosaic look and can even let a hint of edge detail bleed through.
Will it work on a big photo?
Yes. It handles full-resolution images and pixelates at their real pixel dimensions, so a 6000px photo gets the same true block size you set, not an effect that only looks right on the preview.