About BlurLocally

BlurLocally does one job: hide faces, license plates and text in photos — with blur, mosaic, black boxes or an emoji — entirely inside your browser.

It exists because of a contradiction in this tool category. The photos people redact are their most sensitive ones: strangers’ faces, their children, their home, protest crowds, screenshots of private accounts. Yet most “free blur tools” ask you to upload exactly those photos to a server you know nothing about, process them there, and promise deletion. The promise may even be honest — but you can’t verify a promise.

You can verify architecture. This site is static: there is no upload endpoint, no processing queue, no account system. Face detection runs as WebAssembly in your browser, served from this domain. The tool keeps working with your connection switched off, which is the two-minute proof — here’s how to run it on this site or any competitor.

Principles

• Local only. Photos never leave your device. Not “deleted after” — never received.
• Redaction must be irreversible. Effects discard pixels rather than smear them, exports are flattened, and metadata is stripped. The reasoning is public.
• Free without a catch. No signup, no watermark, no daily cap. Your device does the work, so serving you costs almost nothing.
• Honest about limits. Detection misses some faces; blurring a face doesn’t hide a tattoo; nothing here recalls a photo already posted. The pages say so.

Who makes this

BlurLocally is built and maintained by an independent developer as part of a small family of single-purpose, local-first browser tools. It may eventually show unobtrusive ads to cover its costs — if it does, they will sit outside the tool and will never see your photos, because the no-upload architecture doesn’t change with the funding model.

Questions, bug reports, or a redaction scenario the site should cover? Get in touch.