Blur or pixelate faces

Upload your photo above, then click “Auto-detect faces” or drag a box over each face. Pixelateme pixelates just those areas — download the result as a PNG.

Yes. Auto-detect finds and pixelates every face it sees, and you can draw a box over any extra faces or objects to hide them too.

Pixelate is usually better for the main subject — it keeps the shape of the person while destroying identifying detail. Blur looks softer and suits background bystanders, but keep the strength high. For text, use the black bar instead.

Just drag a box over it yourself. Detection struggles with profiles, faces turned away, sunglasses and masks, small faces in crowds, and reflections. Always check the result before you share it.

No. All processing happens locally in your browser — your images never leave your device, so it’s completely private.

Yes, Pixelateme is 100% free, with no sign-up and no watermarks.

Yes. Drag a box over anything — a licence plate, a name badge, a screen, a tattoo, a document. The box does not care what is inside it.

Yes, in any modern browser on iPhone and Android as well as desktop.

Not in the sense people usually mean. Pixelation throws the original pixels away, so there is nothing left to restore. What the “unpixelate with AI” tools do is generate a plausible-looking face or texture that would pixelate down to the same blocks — an invention, not a recovery. A widely reported 2020 face-upscaling demo made the point badly and publicly when it turned a pixelated photo of a well-known Black politician into a white man. Treat their output as a guess, never as evidence of what was underneath.

For faces and general detail in a photo you are posting publicly, yes — if you go heavy enough that the region is only a handful of blocks across. Two real caveats, though. Researchers have shown that pixelated faces can often be matched back to the right person when the attacker already has a small set of candidate photos — that is re-identification, not reconstruction, but the outcome is the same. And pixelated text is genuinely recoverable: published tools can reconstruct pixelated screenshot text when the font and rendering are known. For names, numbers, addresses and licence plates, use a solid black bar instead.

It depends where you are and why you are publishing, and this is not legal advice — but the direction of travel is clear. Under the GDPR a recognisable face counts as personal data, so publishing an identifiable stranger without a lawful basis can be a violation, including for photos taken in public. Anonymising the image is the usual answer when consent is not practical. Plenty of places outside the EU have narrower rules, and journalism and personal use are often treated differently. If in doubt, blur them — it costs you nothing and it is what most publishers do.

No. The classic eye bar is a convention, not a protection — jawline, hairline, ears, build, tattoos, clothing and the setting all identify people, and anyone who already knows the person will recognise them instantly. If the goal is genuine anonymity, hide the whole face rather than a strip of it, and think about the badge, the number plate and the house number in the background too.

“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.