Redact a screenshot (the safe way)
Paste a screenshot straight from your clipboard (Ctrl+V — or ⌘V on a Mac) and drag boxes over whatever needs to disappear: names, emails, order numbers, balances, tokens. This preset uses solid black boxes, and that’s deliberate.
Blurring or pixelating text is provably unsafe: tools like Depix and Bishop Fox’s Unredacter reconstruct pixelated text by re-rendering candidate characters in the same font and matching the blocks. Screenshots are their best-case target — known fonts, clean backgrounds, regular spacing. A solid box has nothing to reconstruct.
Preset: solid black boxes — the only text redaction that can’t be reversed. Screenshots stay PNG.
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 “Redact a screenshot (the safe way)”.
- 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.
What people forget to redact in screenshots
The obvious target is the account number in the middle — the leaks live at the edges. Browser tabs show other sites you’re logged into; the taskbar shows apps; notification banners drop names and message previews into the corner at the worst moment; profile avatars identify accounts even with the name boxed; URLs carry usernames and tokens in query strings; and timestamps plus battery percentage can corroborate exactly when and where a screenshot was taken. Sweep the full frame, not just the middle.
Screenshots don’t carry GPS EXIF the way camera photos do, but the export here is re-encoded clean regardless — and stays PNG, so your redacted screenshot remains pixel-crisp instead of getting JPEG-smudged.
Crop first, then redact
The strongest redaction is the pixels you never share. If only one paragraph matters, screenshot that region (every OS supports region capture: Win+Shift+S, or ⇧⌘4 on a Mac) and you’ll have far less to box out. Then paste it here for the names that remain.
Tips that save a re-edit
- Ctrl+V works anywhere on this page — no need to save the screenshot to a file first.
- Box slightly beyond the text: descenders and anti-aliased edges can hint at characters.
- Redact QR codes and barcodes like text — they encode data that scanners read even when small.
- Double-check dark mode screenshots: low-contrast text is easy to miss on a quick pass.
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
Why black boxes instead of blur? Blur looks nicer.
Because blurred and pixelated text can often be recovered. Depix (2020) and Unredacter (2022) demonstrated it publicly, and screenshots — uniform fonts on clean backgrounds — are the easiest case. Solid boxes leave zero residual information. If you only remember one thing from this site: never blur text that matters, cover it.
Can someone extract the text from under the box in the downloaded file?
No. The download is a flat re-encoded image — the covered pixels are replaced, not layered over. This is exactly the failure that has burned court filings and agency PDFs, where “redacted” text sat under a removable rectangle. A flattened bitmap has no such layer.
Does redacting keep my screenshot sharp?
Yes — PNG in, PNG out by default. Text stays crisp because PNG is lossless; nothing outside your boxes is altered.