Tooooolbox
100% private
October 15, 2026 · 5 min read
Before sharing a photo online, you often need to hide something in it: a bystander's face, a licence plate, a house number, an address on a document. Blurring is the standard way to do it — quick, familiar, and effective when done right. Here's how to blur part of an image and make sure the hidden information stays hidden.
Common reasons to blur include protecting the privacy of people who didn't consent to being photographed, hiding personal data like addresses, names or ID numbers, obscuring licence plates before posting a car photo, and removing sensitive details from screenshots. It's a small step that prevents real privacy problems.
For faces and plates specifically, blurring is usually enough — but see the note below on doing it properly.
Blurring softens an area so its detail becomes unreadable while still blending naturally into the photo. An alternative is to cover the area with a solid block (a black bar or box), which is more absolute but more visually intrusive. Pixelation is a third option, though a heavy blur and pixelation achieve a similar effect.
For most everyday cases — a face in the background, a plate, a house number — a strong blur looks clean and does the job.
One important tip: apply enough blur. A light blur can sometimes be partially reversed by software, and small text or numbers can remain faintly legible. Use a strong blur so the underlying detail is genuinely destroyed, not just softened.
Also, always export a new, flattened image after blurring — don't rely on a layered file where the original could still exist underneath. Saving a fresh JPEG or PNG bakes the blur permanently into the pixels.
Drop your photo into our blur tool, brush over the area you want to hide — a face, a plate, some text — adjust the strength, and download the result. Everything happens locally in your browser, so the original photo is never uploaded, which matters a lot when the whole point is privacy.