Blur a license plate
Selling a car, posting a parking dispute, sharing a photo of a near miss — all of them put a license plate in front of strangers.
A plate is a lookup key. In a fair number of places it can be turned into a name and an address, legitimately or otherwise, and it is unique to one vehicle in a way that a photograph of a street is not.
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.
How it finds the plate
By reading the text in the picture and checking it against the shapes license plates take — the letter-and-digit patterns used across a number of countries. A string that looks like a plate gets its own switch and its own count.
It is more reliable on a plate facing the camera and in focus than on one at an angle or in motion. When it misses, drag a box over it: that takes three seconds and is the whole job.
A solid box, every time
Plates default to a solid fill, not a blur. The character set is tiny, the font is standardized by law, and the position of each character is predictable — which makes a blurred plate one of the easier things to recover. A filled rectangle is not.
The other thing in that photo
A photograph of a car almost always says where the car was. The coordinates are in the file, written by the phone, and they are frequently the seller’s own driveway.
The copy you download from here has no coordinates, because the picture is drawn again from scratch. Covering the plate and leaving the location in would be an odd place to stop.
How to do it
- 1Open the photoPlates and other text are read and covered.
- 2Check the plate is the one coveredReveal anything else you need visible.
- 3Download itSolid box on the plate, no location data in the file.
Questions
It recognizes the common North American and European shapes. Anywhere it does not, drag a box over the plate — three seconds, and the result is identical.
Less than you would hope, which is why the default here is a solid box. A mild blur on a standardized font is a solvable problem.
That depends on where you are and what the photo is for, and it is not advice we can give you. What we can say is that a plate identifies one vehicle, and that identifying a vehicle often identifies a person.
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We report no issues found, never “safe”. Absence of detections is not proof of absence, and detection is best-effort.