Censor an image before you share it
Black out names, addresses, card numbers or faces with solid bars, blur or mosaic. The covered pixels are destroyed, not hidden behind an overlay.
- Runs in your browser
- Files are never uploaded
- Free, no account
Censoring a screenshot properly
Nearly every leak of “redacted” material comes from the same mistake: the black rectangle was drawn as an object on top of the content instead of replacing it. In PDFs, slide decks, design files and many screenshot annotators, that rectangle is a separate layer — select it, delete it, and the original is underneath, intact. This page does the opposite. The pixels inside your box are overwritten before the file is encoded, so there is nothing to peel away.
How to use it
- Drop in the screenshot, photo or scan.
- Drag a rectangle over each thing that must not be published: names, emails, account numbers, addresses, API keys, faces.
- Leave the effect on Solid block for text. Switch to blur or mosaic only for faces and scenery.
- Check the preview, then export. The result is re-encoded from raw pixels, so metadata goes with it.
A checklist for screenshots you are about to post
- The obvious content — the figure, the name, the message you are asking about.
- The chrome. Browser tabs give away every other thing you had open. The address bar carries session tokens and internal hostnames. Bookmarks bars are a map of your employer.
- Notifications and the clock. A banner from a private group, an email subject line, and a timestamp that places you somewhere.
- Autocomplete and history. A dropdown open under a search field is a favourite source of accidental disclosure.
- Reflections and second copies. A monitor visible in a phone photo, a preview pane, a thumbnail strip.
- Usernames in file paths.
C:\Users\firstname.lastname\…in a terminal or a title bar identifies you precisely.
Why solid black beats blur for anything textual
Blur and mosaic are deterministic filters over a small candidate space when the content is short structured text. Someone who suspects the hidden value is a six-digit order number can render all million candidates, apply the identical filter and compare — this has been demonstrated repeatedly on real redacted documents. A filled rectangle has no residual signal at all: every pixel is the same value, and no amount of computation recovers what was there. Keep blur for faces, where there is no enumerable candidate set.
Colour choice
Black is conventional and unambiguous. White can look tidier on a light screenshot, but it also looks like an empty field rather than a deliberate redaction, which invites the reader to assume nothing was there. If you are censoring for a report or a bug ticket, black with a visible border communicates intent — and if you need to distinguish categories of redaction, use two obviously different colours and say what they mean in the caption.
What happens to the file itself
| Concern | What this tool does |
|---|---|
| Hidden layers | None exist. The output is a flat raster encoded from the canvas. |
| Undo history | Not written to the file — unlike some editors that embed edit history or a preview of the previous state. |
| EXIF / GPS | Discarded, because the file is built from pixels rather than patched. |
| Embedded thumbnail | Discarded. This is the one that most often leaks the pre-redaction image. |
| Upload | Never happens. The image is opened, drawn and encoded entirely in this tab. |
Working with documents rather than images
If your source is a PDF, censoring a screenshot of it is a workaround. Redacting the PDF itself — rasterising the affected pages and stripping the text layer — is the more thorough route, and the reason our PDF redaction tool deliberately destroys the text layer rather than covering it. For images, this page is the right tool; for contracts and discovery material, use that one.
Related tools
Blur Face in Photo for people, Pixelate Image for a mosaic look, and Remove EXIF Data when the pixels are fine but the metadata is not.
Questions
Why is a solid block safer than a blur for text?
Blur and mosaic are reversible in principle for short, structured text: an attacker can render every plausible string, apply the same filter and compare. A solid fill has no information left in it at all, so there is nothing to compare against.
Is this the same as drawing a rectangle in a screenshot app?
It is safer. Many editors — and every PDF and slide tool — store the rectangle as a separate object over the original image, which anyone can select and delete. Here the pixels underneath are replaced before the file is written.
Does the censored file still contain my metadata?
No. Because we re-encode from raw pixels, EXIF, GPS, device details and the embedded preview thumbnail are all discarded — the thumbnail is the one that most often leaks the uncensored original.
Can I censor a screenshot of a spreadsheet or a bank statement?
Yes, and it is one of the main uses. Drag a box over each figure, use the solid block, and check the preview before exporting — the preview is a scaled-down copy of the exact pixels you will download.