Blur faces in a photo

Most photos worth sharing have someone in them who didn’t ask to be on your feed. Blurring them keeps the moment and drops the identity, which is usually all a post needs.

• Children at a party, a school play or a sports day, when their parents haven’t said yes.
• Customers in the background of a shop, salon, gym or restaurant photo.
• Strangers in travel photos, street shots and event crowds.
• Screenshots of DMs or comments you share as reviews: cover the person’s name and profile picture.
• Number plates, house numbers, ID badges and screens showing personal details.

Tip: If you’re not sure someone would be happy to appear, assume they wouldn’t. Asking first is better still, and a blurred face loses almost nothing from the picture.

A light blur makes a photo look private without making it private. A 2016 research paper showed that software trained on blurred and pixelated faces could still tell people apart, and friends can often recognise someone from hair, clothes and build anyway.

• Solid: the only style that removes the face completely. Use it for children and for anyone who could be at risk if found.
• Blur at 70% or more: hides features well and looks softer on a feed. This is where the slider starts.
• Pixelate at full strength: four large blocks across the face. Fewer, bigger blocks hide more than many small ones.

Tip: Hide what identifies the person, not just the face: a name tag, a school logo, a team shirt with a name on the back or a distinctive tattoo can give them away.

The detector is MediaPipe’s BlazeFace short-range model from Google, built for selfie-style pictures where faces are close to the camera. On its own it misses faces that are small in the frame, so this tool also searches overlapping squares of the photo at several sizes and merges what it finds. That catches most faces that are visible and roughly facing the lens.

• Faces turned side-on, looking down, or partly behind a hand, a phone or sunglasses can be missed.
• Very small faces in a crowd, only a few dozen pixels across, often are.
• Faces on posters, screens and drawings may or may not be picked up.

Treat the boxes as a first draft. Look over the whole photo before you download, and add a box wherever someone could still be recognised.

Everything runs in this browser tab. Your photo is opened, edited and saved on your device; the only download is the face detector, about 10 MB the first time, which your browser then keeps. Nothing of your picture is stored once you close the page.

The file you save is a new image drawn from scratch, with no layers to peel back: the covered areas are gone from it, not hidden under a sticker. The camera details phones store inside photos, including the place it was taken, aren’t copied into it either. PNG, WebP and GIF files are saved as PNG; other photos, such as JPEG and HEIC, as JPEG at 95% quality.