Photo Redactor
Black out plates, faces and personal details. Free, no signup, no upload.
How It Works
Choose a photo or screenshot. Drag a rectangle over each thing you want to hide: a license plate, a face, a house number, a name or an email address in a screenshot. Each box is solid black unless you switch it to pixelate. What you see in the preview is exactly what gets saved.
When you download, the edited pixels are saved as a brand new PNG or JPG. Nothing from the original file comes along, so the location, camera and date stored in a phone photo are left behind too. The photo is turned upright first if your camera stored it sideways.
More detail in the guide: How to hide a license plate in a photo.
Why Solid Boxes Beat Blur
Blur and pixelation do not delete information. They mix each small area into an average. For text, especially short strings in a known font such as plate numbers or account numbers, that average can be enough to guess the original. Researchers at UC San Diego showed in 2016 that pixelated and blurred text in screenshots could be decoded with statistical models, and concluded that neither is a viable way to redact text. The open-source Depix proof of concept recovers text from pixelated screenshots when the font and editor can be matched.
Faces are harder to reverse, but not safe either. A 2016 study from Cornell Tech and the University of Texas at Austin trained a neural network to tell 40 people apart in photos with YouTube-style face blur. It was right 57% of the time, against 2.5% for guessing, while the authors could not recognise the blurred faces by eye.
A solid box replaces the pixels with one flat colour. There is nothing left to analyse. That is why this tool uses solid boxes by default and makes its pixelation deliberately coarse.
What to Check Before Sharing
| Easy to miss | Where it hides |
|---|---|
| Location | Photo metadata (removed here), street signs, house numbers |
| Plate numbers | Front and back of every car in the frame, reflections |
| Names, emails | Screenshot headers, browser tabs, notification banners |
| Codes | QR codes, barcodes, boarding passes, parcel labels |
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I hide a license plate in a photo?
Choose the photo, then drag a box over the plate with your mouse or finger. The plate is covered with solid black straight away. Add more boxes if needed, then download the new image.
Should I use a black box or pixelation?
Use a solid black box for anything that must stay secret, especially text and numbers. A black box replaces the pixels completely, so there is nothing left to recover. Pixelation keeps an average of the original colours, and tools and research have shown that pixelated or blurred text can sometimes be reconstructed or guessed.
Does the downloaded photo still contain my location or camera details?
No. The download is a brand new image drawn from the edited pixels on a canvas, so EXIF data such as GPS location, camera model and the date taken is not copied into it.
Can someone remove the black box later?
Not from the file this tool saves. The box is drawn into the pixels and the image is saved again from scratch, so there is no hidden layer underneath. Keep in mind that the original photo on your device still shows everything.
Can I use it on my phone?
Yes. Drag with your finger to draw a box. It works on iPhone and Android browsers. If your iPhone photo is in HEIC format and does not open, open this page in Safari or convert it with the HEIC to JPG tool first.
Are my photos uploaded?
No. The photo is opened, edited and saved entirely in your browser. Nothing is sent to a server.