How to blur a face in a photo
Open the photo, then drag a rectangle across the face you want to hide. Press Apply blur and the region is replaced with blurred pixels. Repeat for every other face in the frame: each blur is added to a stack, so a group shot with four bystanders takes four selections rather than four separate exports.
The blur strength slider runs from 4 to 40 pixels and starts at 18. Low values soften a face without erasing it, which is usually not enough for real privacy. Higher values destroy the detail completely. If the face is small in the frame, push the slider up, because a 4 pixel blur on a 40 pixel face still leaves the features readable.
Zoom runs from 20% to 400% with a Fit button, and a move mode lets you pan around a large image while you work. Revert removes the last blur you applied and Reset all clears the stack, so a rectangle that landed in the wrong place costs you one click rather than a reload.
- Open one photo from your device
- Drag a rectangle over the face
- Set the blur strength and press Apply blur
- Repeat for every other face, then export
Selection is manual, and that is deliberate
This tool does not detect faces automatically. There is no model, no scanning pass, and no suggested rectangles: you choose every region yourself. That is a real trade, so it is worth being clear about which side of it you are on.
What you give up is speed on a photo with twenty faces in it. What you get is that the photo never leaves your browser, nothing has to be uploaded to a detection service, and the tool cannot quietly miss a face and hand you a file you believed was clean. Automatic detection fails on faces in profile, faces partly behind something, and faces at the edge of the frame, and it fails silently. A rectangle you drew yourself does not.
It also means you can blur things that are not faces at all. A name badge, a house number, a license plate, a whiteboard, a screen in the background: the rectangle does not care what is inside it.
What the exported file actually contains
The export is destructive on purpose. The blur is baked into the pixel data, not stored as a reversible layer or a filter setting, so there is nothing in the exported file for anyone to peel back. The undo history exists only in the open browser tab and is gone when you leave the page.
Because the image is redrawn onto a canvas and re-encoded, the export also drops EXIF, GPS coordinates, IPTC fields, and the embedded color profile. That is usually a bonus on a photo you are about to publish, since a blurred face is not much protection if the file still carries the address where it was taken. If you need the metadata gone from a photo you are not blurring, Metadata Removal handles that on its own.
You can export as PNG, JPG, or WebP. PNG is lossless and the safest default. JPG and WebP add a quality slider that runs from 0.45 to 0.98 and starts at 0.92. At least one blur has to be applied before the export button unlocks.
- Blurred pixels are permanent in the exported file
- EXIF, GPS, and color profile are stripped by the re-encode
- PNG, JPG, or WebP output, with a quality slider on the lossy two