Turn photos into pixel art

Drop your image into the box above, set the pixel size, pick a palette, and download the PNG. Everything runs in your browser — nothing is uploaded.

They restrict the image to that machine’s real colours — four greens for Game Boy, 54 colours for the NES, 16 for CGA. Full Color keeps the original colours and only enlarges the pixels.

Dithering scatters pixels between two palette colours to fake a third, which is how old hardware faked gradients. Leave it on for photos — without it, skies and skin tones band into flat stripes.

Bigger blocks look more retro but destroy detail. Close-up subjects tolerate 32–64px; busy or wide scenes usually need 12–24px to stay readable.

Yes — drop in a clip and it exports an animated pixel GIF, with a frame-rate slider. See pixelate a video.

Completely free, no sign-up, and nothing is watermarked.

No. Conversion happens locally in your browser, so your files never leave your device.

No, and it is worth being straight about that: this tool adds pixelation on purpose. If your picture went blocky by itself, the usual causes are a low-resolution original being displayed larger than its real size, a site re-compressing your upload, or generation loss from a file that has been saved and re-uploaded many times. The fix is to go back to the highest-resolution original you have and upload it at the size it will actually be shown — not to run it through an editor.

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.

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.

“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.

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.