Image Redactor

Redaction means permanently removing information from the pixels, not placing a shape on top of them. This tool offers the three common methods. A solid box replaces every pixel in the area with one colour, black by default, so nothing remains to recover. Pixelation splits the area into square blocks and fills each block with the exact average colour of its pixels. Blur smears the area with a strong Gaussian blur in two passes, which looks softer but keeps more of the overall structure.

Not all methods are equally safe. Researchers have shown that pixelated text can sometimes be reconstructed, because a known font at a known size produces predictable block patterns, and tools such as Depix demonstrate this on screenshots with small blocks. Light blur on small text can also be partly reversed. For passwords, card numbers, IDs, API keys and anything else that must stay secret, use a solid box. Pixelation with large blocks and strong blur are fine for faces in a crowd or a licence plate in the background, where the goal is privacy rather than security.

Each region you draw has its own mode and strength. Click a region to select it, drag it to move it, pull any corner handle to resize it, or press Delete to remove it. Changing the mode, block size, blur radius or box colour affects the selected region, and the Apply to all button copies the current settings to every region at once. Undo and redo (Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+Shift+Z) cover every change, and the preview always shows exactly what the export will contain.

Export is irreversible by design. The effect is computed on a canvas at the image’s full resolution and written into the pixels, so the file has no hidden layers and no copy of the original underneath. Because the image is re-encoded as PNG, JPG or WebP, EXIF metadata such as GPS coordinates, camera model and capture time is removed as well. All processing happens on your device, so the unredacted original is never uploaded.