Blur or redact a screenshot

Upload the screenshot above, drag a box over each part you want hidden, choose Black bar, Pixelate or Blur, and download the PNG.

Not reliably. Pixelated or lightly blurred text can sometimes be recovered because fonts are predictable. Use the solid black bar for names, numbers and messages.

Open this page in Safari, upload the screenshot from Photos, drag a box over the name with your finger, keep Black bar selected, and save the result. Avoid the semi-transparent highlighter in the iOS markup tool.

No. Everything happens in your browser, which matters when the screenshot contains private messages.

Not from the exported PNG. The bar replaces those pixels, so there is nothing underneath. Just make sure you share the exported file, not the original.

Yes. Free, no account, no watermark.

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.

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.

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.