Blur a face in a photo
Open the picture and every face in it is already covered. From there you decide: click a face to reveal it again, or leave the lot blurred and save a copy.
Starting from covered rather than uncovered is the whole idea. Asked to find the faces yourself, you will get the obvious ones and miss the person reflected in a shop window.
Works today, in your browser. Photos open in the editor and Word documents are checked for hidden data; either way the file is read on your device and never uploaded.
What a blur is actually doing
The blur is applied to the pixels and the picture is written out again, so there is no layer to peel off and nothing underneath. That is not true of every tool: an annotation drawn over an image in a document, or a filter applied in an app that keeps the original, can often be undone by whoever receives it.
It is applied several times over, which matters. A single mild blur of a face can sometimes be reversed; repeated passes destroy the detail rather than smearing it.
Blur, pixelate, or a solid box
Faces default to a blur because it reads better — a photograph of your friends with black rectangles where two strangers were is a photograph nobody wants to post.
For words and numbers the default is the opposite: a solid box, because a blurred word can sometimes be read back. You can change either, and the editor says so when you pick the weaker option over text.
The part people forget
A photograph carries more than the picture. The coordinates where it was taken, the phone that took it and the second it happened are all written into the file, and blurring a face does nothing about any of them.
The copy you download here has none of that, because a re-drawn picture has no metadata to carry. It is removed as a consequence of how the editing works rather than as a separate step you could forget.
How to do it
- 1Drop the photo inIt opens with every face already covered.
- 2Click any face you want visibleYour own, usually. Everyone else stays blurred.
- 3Download the covered copyThe blur is in the pixels, and the location data is gone with it.
Questions
Not from the file you download. The pixels are replaced and the picture is encoded again, so there is no original underneath. What you cannot control is the copy you still have — the point is that the one you share no longer contains it.
No. The face model and the editing both run in your browser, in a worker that has no way to send the picture anywhere. You can watch the network panel while you work.
No. A face turned away, very small, or in deep shadow may be missed, which is why you can drag a box over anything yourself. Look at the result before you share it.
No. It finds that a face is there and where it sits, so it can be covered. There is no identification, no age guess, and nothing is stored about anyone.
Related
- Blur the faces in the backgroundCover the people behind you without blurring the person the photo is of. One slider decides where the backgrou…
- Blur everyone in a photoCover every face in a picture, or every whole person, when a uniform or a build is as recognisable as a face. …
- Photo privacy checkerCheck a photo for GPS coordinates, camera details, timestamps and faces before you post it. Runs in your brows…
We report no issues found, never “safe”. Absence of detections is not proof of absence, and detection is best-effort.