Save the photo

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This is the last step. The boxes you drew are composed onto the full-resolution original and the finished file goes to your browser's downloads. That composition happens on your own device, the same as every step before it.

PNG or JPG

PNG is lossless. Every pixel in the saved file matches the pixel the tool drew, which is what you want when the photo carries a solid bar: the redaction lands exactly as opaque and exactly as hard-edged as it looked on screen. The cost is file size. A PNG of a 12-megapixel photograph can easily run to several megabytes.

JPG is smaller and perfectly adequate for a photograph destined for a listing or a social post. Its compression softens fine edges very slightly, so at heavy zoom the boundary of a bar can pick up a faint halo. That is cosmetic, and it does not weaken the redaction: a solid bar replaced the pixels underneath before the file was encoded, so there is nothing left beneath the black for a compressor to smear back into view.

Blur and pixelation are a different matter. They rearrange the pixels they cover instead of discarding them, so they can sometimes be partly reversed, where a solid bar cannot be. If a region on this photo is hiding something that would genuinely hurt to expose, go back to adjusting the boxes and set it to solid before you save.

The file is the size you opened

The download has the same pixel dimensions as the file you brought in. A 4032 × 3024 phone photo comes back 4032 × 3024. Nothing is downscaled to a preview, nothing is capped and nothing is watermarked. The canvas you were dragging boxes on is limited to 3,000 pixels along its long edge so that phones do not run out of memory mid-edit, but the export is composed against the original at full resolution, not against that preview.

What happens to the metadata

Rebuilding an image through the canvas keeps the pixels and drops everything else. The copy you download therefore arrives with no camera model, no lens, no timestamp and no GPS coordinates — a side effect of how the file is written rather than a separate cleaning pass, though a useful one, since a photo taken at home can otherwise carry the coordinates of the house it was taken in. For a photo that needs only that and no covering at all, the metadata stripper lists what a file is carrying and writes a clean copy back out.

The check before you publish

Two minutes here is worth more than everything else on this page. Open the downloaded file itself, at full size, not the thumbnail your file manager drew for it.

• Zoom into each covered area in turn. Confirm the bar sits where you meant it to and overlaps a little past the edges of whatever it hides.
• Then look at the whole frame again, slowly, for the things the tool has no way to find on its own: a reflection in a window, a wing mirror or a kettle; a house number or a street sign; a screen with an inbox open on it; a letter or a prescription on the table; a uniform, a lanyard or a name badge.

Face detection finds faces. Everything else on that list is covered only because you drew a box over it — there is no automatic plate reader and no automatic text finder here, which is why a license plate and a printed address are both jobs you do by hand. If these are property photos, what estate agents miss walks the same check room by room.

Your original, and this tab

The file you opened is untouched. The tool read it into memory and never wrote back over it, so the original is still sitting where it was, metadata and all. Nothing about this session outlives the tab: no history, no autosave, no copy on a server, because there is no server to keep one on. Close it and the working image and every box you drew are gone. If you want two versions — a lighter one for family, a heavier one for a public post — make the second now, or open the original again and start over.