Blur a license plate

Upload the photo above, drag a box over the plate, choose Pixelate, Blur or Black bar, and download the PNG. It’s free, and nothing is uploaded.

No. Auto-detect finds faces only. Plates are marked by dragging a box, which takes a few seconds and means none are missed.

For a background car, a strong blur or pixelation is usually fine. When the plate matters, use the black bar: it removes the characters, while light blur or pixelation on short text can sometimes be guessed.

Not with this tool. It hides areas in still photos; it does not track a moving plate in video. Take a still frame, or use a video editor with motion tracking.

Yes. Open the page in your phone’s browser, pick the photo from your camera roll, drag a box with your finger, and save the result.

It isn’t required, but many sellers do it to avoid cloned plates and unwanted attention. Buyers can see the plate at the viewing.

Often, yes — which is why it should never be pixelated in the first place. Text is drawn from a small alphabet in a predictable font, so a pixelated block can be compared against every candidate string rendered the same way until one matches. Public tools that do exactly this to screenshots have existed since 2020. Blur has the same weakness. Use Black bar for anything made of characters, and pixelation only for faces, bodies and scenery.

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.

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.