Pixelate an image

Drop the image into the box above, drag the Pixel Size slider until it looks right, and click Download. The pixelated copy saves as a PNG. Nothing is uploaded — it all happens in your browser.

Yes. Switch to the Hide Faces tab, then drag a box over each area you want pixelated. The rest of the picture stays completely sharp, and you can add as many boxes as you like.

Use this page. GIMP’s Filters → Blur → Pixelise and Photoshop’s Filter → Pixelate → Mosaic do the same thing, but they need an install and a selection tool. If pixelating the picture is the whole task, doing it here is faster and free.

For a retro look, 24–64px. To genuinely hide a face, make the region no more than about 8–12 blocks wide. For text or numbers, use a black bar instead of pixelation.

For faces and general detail, heavy pixelation is effectively irreversible. For text — names, account numbers, licence plates — light pixelation of a known font can sometimes be reconstructed, so use the solid black bar option for those instead.

Anything your browser can open — JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF and more, up to 15 MB. The download is always a PNG so the pixel blocks stay sharp.

It is completely free, with no sign-up, no account and no watermark on anything you download.

Yes — one at a time. Pixelate and download the first, then drop in the next. Your settings stay where you left them.

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.

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.

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.

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.