Pixelate a video

Drop the clip into the box above, set the pixel size, palette and frame rate, then click Download. The pixelated version saves as an animated GIF. Nothing is uploaded — it renders in your browser.

Anything your browser can play — typically MP4, WebM and MOV — up to 15 MB. Trim a long clip before dropping it in.

An animated GIF. It plays everywhere and posts anywhere, at the cost of a larger file than a real video codec would produce.

Around 8–12 fps. GIF stores every frame in full, so a higher rate mostly buys you a much bigger file. Pixelated footage reads fine at a low frame rate.

No — it pixelates the whole frame evenly. Automatic face tracking across a moving video needs a real video editor. For a single frame, screenshot it and use the face tool, which pixelates only the faces.

Lower the frame rate first, then shorten the clip. Counter-intuitively, a coarser pixel size also shrinks the file, because large flat blocks of one colour compress extremely well in GIF.

No. The clip is decoded and rendered entirely in your browser. It is never transmitted or stored on a server.

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.

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.

“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.