Redact an image
Black out, pixelate or blur parts of a screenshot or photo. The covered pixels are replaced, not hidden and every scrap of metadata goes too.
Drop a screenshot or photo, then drag boxes over what should go.
Your image is redacted on this device. Nothing is uploaded.
The three ways redaction fails
A box on top, with the original underneath
The failure behind most leaked redactions. A black rectangle is drawn in a PDF or a layered image, it looks covered and anyone who copies the text or removes the layer has the original. Here the output is a single flat image and the covered pixels are replaced in it. There is no layer to remove.
The thumbnail nobody checked
Photos carry a small embedded preview in their metadata. Crop or cover something in an editor that leaves the metadata alone and the old preview, showing everything, goes out with the file. This tool writes no metadata at all, preview included.
Pixelation that can be read back
Small blocks over text can be reversed by matching candidate words against them. Block size here has a floor relative to the area being covered and blur is applied on top of pixelation rather than instead of it, so it only softens detail that has already gone. For text, a solid box is still the right answer.
Check before you send
Open the downloaded file, not the preview and look at it at full size. Then look for the things redaction doesn’t touch: a reflection, a name on a badge, a URL in a browser tab at the top of a screenshot, a date in the corner. Those are what give a redacted image away far more often than the box itself.
Common questions
Can a redaction made here be undone?
Not a solid box. The covered pixels are replaced in a new flat image, so there is no original underneath to recover. Pixelation and blur replace the pixels too, but they keep a coarse version of what was there, which is why a solid box is the right choice for text.
Why is pixelation not safe for text?
Because text is predictable. If the font and size are known, someone can pixelate every candidate word the same way and compare the blocks against yours, which is a published and working technique. It struggles with large blocks, so the tool enforces a minimum block size, but a solid box removes the question entirely.
What about the metadata?
All of it is removed. That matters more than it sounds: cameras embed a small preview of the photo in its metadata and editors that change the picture often leave that preview alone, so the unredacted image travels inside the redacted one. The output here is written from scratch and carries no metadata at all.
Is my image uploaded to be redacted?
No and a redaction tool that uploads the image would be defeating itself: the unredacted original would sit on someone else’s server. The work happens in this tab and nothing is transmitted.
Can I redact a PDF here?
Not directly. A PDF can hold real text behind a black box, which is the classic failure. The safe route is to turn the pages into images with the PDF to JPG tool, redact the images here, then rebuild the PDF with image to PDF. The text is then genuinely gone, though it also stops being searchable.
Guides
The other tools
All of them work the same way: the file is read in your browser and never uploaded.