Blur a face in a photo
Drop a photo below and every face in it is detected and blurred on your own device — the photo never leaves your browser, which you can verify by loading this page and then switching off your Wi-Fi. Click any box to adjust or remove it, drag new boxes over anything else, and download a clean copy.
This matters more for face photos than for almost anything else you could upload. A face is permanent, searchable biometric data — handing strangers’ faces (or your own) to an unknown “free blur tool” server defeats the point of blurring them.
Preset: blur, auto-detected faces. Drag extra boxes for anything the scan misses.
Drop a photo here — or click to browse, or paste with Ctrl+V
JPG · PNG · WebP — faces found and hidden on your device, never uploaded
How it works
- Open this page — the tool is already set up for “Blur a face in a photo”.
- Drop your photo in, click to browse, or paste it with Ctrl+V.
- Faces are detected on your device; drag boxes over anything else to hide.
- Check the preview (hold “compare”), then download the flattened, metadata-free copy.
A blur that actually destroys the face
Not all blurs are equal. A light gaussian blur mostly smears pixels around — enough of the original signal survives that researchers have repeatedly shown blurred content being reconstructed or matched. The blur here works differently: the face region is squeezed through a tiny image a few pixels across and rebuilt from that, so the original detail is discarded, not smeared. At the default strength a 200-pixel face passes through roughly a dozen pixels; at maximum, five.
The exported file is a flat image. There are no layers, no hidden original underneath, and no metadata — the download is re-encoded from raw pixels, so EXIF data (including GPS location, camera model and timestamps) doesn’t carry over.
When you’d want this
Posting a photo where strangers are recognizable — street scenes, events, other people’s kids at a party. Listing a room with a family photo on the shelf. Sharing a screenshot of a video call. Sending a dating-profile photo where your friends didn’t sign up to appear. In most of these cases you don’t need to hide everything — click the boxes you want to keep and delete the rest.
Tips that save a re-edit
- Turn the strength up for faces that fill the frame — big faces need a stronger blur to lose their detail.
- The detector finds front-facing faces best. Profiles and heavily turned heads sometimes need a manual box — drag one in two seconds.
- Hold “compare” to flick between original and result before downloading.
- For a face in a reflective surface (mirror, window, sunglasses), draw a manual box — reflections are easy to forget.
Before you post: zoom in and check every face, plate and label yourself. Auto-detection is a head start, not a guarantee — a missed face in a shared photo can’t be un-shared.
Frequently asked questions
Is blurring a face actually enough to hide who it is?
At this tool’s default and higher strengths, the face itself becomes unrecoverable — the pixels are thrown away, not rearranged. But faces aren’t the only identifier in a photo: clothing, tattoos, context and captions can still say who someone is. For maximum certainty use the black-box effect, and think about what the rest of the image reveals.
Can I blur just one face and leave the others?
Yes. After the scan, click any detected box to select it and press Delete (or the Remove button) to drop it. Only the boxes you keep are blurred.
Does the rest of the photo lose quality?
No. Effects apply only inside the boxes. The export re-encodes the whole image once (JPEG at high quality, or lossless PNG), the same as saving it in any editor.