Blur anything in a photo, without uploading it

What this is

BlurMyPhoto covers the parts of a photo you would rather not send out with the rest of it: a face, a license plate, a house number, a name on a letter, a balance in a screenshot. You open the image, black bars go over what matters, you download the result. There is nothing to install and nothing to sign up for, and on a decent photo the whole job takes under a minute.

Faces are found for you. Everything else you cover yourself by dragging a box over it. That split is the honest description of what the software can do, and the sections below explain where the line falls and why it falls there rather than somewhere more flattering.

Why nothing is uploaded

Most image tools online work by sending your file to a server, doing the work there and sending a result back. Many of them promise to delete it afterwards, usually within the hour. That promise can be entirely sincere and still not help you, because it is a promise about a copy of your photo sitting on a disk you do not control.

This site does not offer a better promise. It removes the thing the promise was about. Your file is read by the browser, decoded into pixels inside the page, edited in a canvas element and encoded back out to a file your browser saves. None of that touches a network. There is no upload endpoint, because the site is static files with no server-side code behind them.

A server that never receives your photo cannot leak it in a breach, cannot lose it in a misconfigured bucket, cannot be compelled to hand it over, and cannot keep a copy after you believed it was deleted. There is nothing to delete because there was never anything stored. If you would rather check that than take our word for it, how it works sets out four tests you can run yourself, including watching the network tab while you use the tool and finishing a photo in aeroplane mode (airplane mode).

The four steps

1. Choose a photo. Drop it on the box above, or tap it to open your camera roll. Nothing is sent when you do this; the browser simply hands the page a file it already has.
2. Faces are found automatically. Once you have picked a file, and never before, Google's MediaPipe BlazeFace model is downloaded and run on your own processor. It returns a rectangle for each face it recognises.
3. Adjust, and add what it missed. Move and resize the boxes, delete any that are wrong, and drag fresh boxes over plates, signage, text or anything else. Detection is faces only, so this step is where the rest gets covered.
4. Download. PNG at the original resolution, or JPG. No watermark, no account, no cap on how many photos you run through it.

What you can cover

Six starting points, the same editor underneath. Pick whichever matches the thing in front of you.

• Blur faces — the one with automatic detection. Group photos, a school play, a street scene with strangers in the background.
• Blur a license plate — before a car advert goes up. You draw one box over the plate; there is no automatic plate finder here, and the next section explains why not.
• Pixelate part of a photo — starts in pixelate mode, for when the shape of a thing should stay readable but its detail should not.
• Black out text — an address on an envelope, a name on a form, a booking reference. Solid bars, nothing left underneath.
• Blur a screenshot — an email address, a chat name, a bank balance, before you share the grab in a thread.
• Strip photo metadata — no bars at all. It reads what your file is carrying, GPS coordinates included, and writes a clean copy.

There is no automatic licence-plate detection and no automatic text detection on this site. That is not an oversight. No reliable, permissively licensed model for either runs in a browser today, and shipping a detector that quietly misses half the plates would be worse than asking you to drag one rectangle. Drawing a box takes about two seconds and you can see that it landed.

Which mode to use

Solid bar

Paints the rectangle flat black, replacing the pixels. Nothing of the original survives in the exported file. Irreversible, and the default here.

Pixelate

Averages each block of pixels down to a single value. Those averages are real information about what was underneath, so it is partially recoverable.

Blur

Three stacked box-blur passes. Blurring is a mathematical operation with a partial inverse, so this is partially recoverable too.

Blur and pixelation can sometimes be partially reversed; a solid bar cannot. Choose by consequence rather than by looks — if the thing under the box would do real harm coming back, use the bar. Blur, pixelate or black box compares the three on the cases where the choice actually matters.

What it opens

JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF, BMP, AVIF and SVG, plus HEIC and HEIF as an iPhone writes them, and TIFF. HEIC and TIFF need a small decoder that is fetched only when you open one of those formats.

Camera RAW is refused, with an explanation rather than a broken preview: CR2, CR3, NEF, ARW, DNG, ORF and RAF all get turned away. Browsers cannot decode RAW reliably, and pretending otherwise would produce a mangled image you might not notice was mangled. Export a JPG or PNG from whatever you shoot with and bring that instead.

Still images only — this is not a video tool. The working canvas is capped at 3,000 pixels on the long edge so a phone does not run out of memory while you drag boxes, but the file you download is always composed against the full-resolution original. Re-encoding through the canvas also drops the EXIF block as a side effect, GPS coordinates included.