Covering a face or detail before sharing a photo
Drag a rectangle over the area that needs hiding — a face, a licence plate, a document, anything else that should not be visible — and it is blurred or pixelated before you share the image. Both effects are applied only to the selected region; the rest of the photo is untouched.
Blur versus pixelate
| Effect | How it looks | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Blur | Smoothly softened, no hard edges | The more common, less visually jarring choice for casual sharing |
| Pixelate | Chunky visible blocks | Reads unambiguously as 'deliberately censored' — the classic news-broadcast look |
Both are applied at the pixel level within the selected region and, done at sufficient strength, neither can be reversed to recover the original detail — the source pixels inside that region are genuinely discarded, not merely hidden under an overlay.
A genuine caution worth taking seriously
A censor applied too lightly is not real privacy — a light blur or a large pixel size can sometimes be approximately reversed with dedicated software, particularly for simple, repetitive content like a licence plate's limited character set. Use a strong setting for anything that actually matters, and when in doubt, crop the sensitive area out of the frame entirely rather than relying on any blur or pixelation to be unrecoverable. For genuinely sensitive documents, cropping out or physically covering the information before photographing it is safer than relying on any digital censoring after the fact.
How this differs from redacting a document
This is built for photos — faces, plates, casual sensitive detail in an image. For a scanned document or a PDF where text needs to be genuinely and permanently removed rather than visually obscured, Redact PDF is the purpose-built tool: it rebuilds the page as an image with no underlying text layer left to extract, which is a stronger guarantee than pixelating a JPEG.