Pixel me

It is shorthand for turning a photo of yourself into pixel art — a portrait rebuilt from large square pixels, like a character in an 8-bit game. Drop a selfie in above and you will have one in a few seconds.

Upload a photo of yourself, drag the Pixel Size slider until it looks right, choose a palette (Game Boy, NES, CGA or full colour), and hit Download. The result saves as a PNG.

For a close-up selfie, 24–40px usually reads best. For a wider shot, drop to 12–20px so your face still has enough blocks to be recognisable. Crop tight first — it makes a bigger difference than any other setting.

No. Those are commissioned, hand-made pixel art and take days. This is an instant automated converter that is free and runs in your browser. Different tools for different jobs — if you want a crafted portrait, hire an artist.

Yes. Push the pixel size up, pick CGA or Game Boy for maximum retro damage, and download the PNG. It also works on video, which exports as an animated GIF — see pixelate a video.

No. Everything runs locally in your browser. Your photo is never sent to a server, never stored, and never used for anything else.

Then use Blur or pixelate faces instead — it auto-detects faces and censors just those areas, leaving the rest of the photo sharp.

Yes. It works in any modern browser on desktop, iPhone and Android — the same page, the same features.

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.

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.

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.

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.