8-bit photo filter

Upload it above. The NES palette and a 96-pixel width are already set; adjust the width slider for more or less detail and download the PNG.

It varies by machine. The NES palette here has 54 usable colours and CGA has 16. Strictly, “8-bit” refers to the processor, not a fixed number of colours, but the look always means a small palette.

Choose Full Colour, set the width to about 112–128 pixels and turn dithering off. 16-bit consoles showed many more colours, so the look comes mostly from resolution.

The 16-colour palette of IBM’s Color Graphics Adapter from 1981. It gives a harsh, high-contrast early-PC look.

No. The conversion runs entirely in your browser, so the picture never leaves your device.

The output is your own photo, converted. Pixelateme adds no watermark and claims nothing. Just make sure you have the rights to the original picture.

It destroys detail permanently — that is the point — but the exported file is not necessarily smaller. The pixel dimensions stay the same; only the content becomes blockier. As it happens, large flat areas of a single colour compress very well, so a heavily pixelated PNG often ends up smaller than the original. Keep your untouched original, because you cannot undo it from the export.

“Pixelate” and “mosaic” are the same effect under two names: the area is divided into a grid and each cell is flattened to one average colour, giving hard-edged blocks. Blur instead smears each pixel into its neighbours, producing a soft smudge with no edges. Pixelation looks deliberate and is easier to judge at a glance, which is why it is the default for censoring faces; blur looks gentler and less like a redaction. Neither is safe for text.

Most of them do — they receive your file, process it on their servers and hand back a link, which means a copy exists on someone else’s machine, usually under terms that let them retain it. That is a poor trade when the reason you are pixelating is that the image shows something private. Pixelateme is built the other way round: the work is done by your own browser with the Canvas API, so nothing is transmitted. If you want to prove it, load this page, switch off your network, and it still works.

No. Every feature is free, there is no account, nothing is watermarked, and there is no resolution or export limit beyond the 15 MB input cap. The site is paid for by the ads you see, and a $5 donation turns those off for a year. That is the entire business model.