Image Region Redactor - Blur or Pixelate Sensitive Areas

How to use this tool

1. Click to choose, drop, or paste an image.
2. Drag across the image with a mouse, pen, or touch to mark regions.
3. Choose Black Fill, Pixelate, or Blur for the redaction style.
4. Apply the regions, then download the redacted PNG.

About This Tool

The Image Redactor lets you mark sensitive areas of a photo - faces, license plates, addresses, or any private information - and apply a blur, pixelation, or solid black fill to those regions. All processing happens locally in your browser using the HTML5 Canvas API.

What to redact

• PII: names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, dates of birth
• Financial data: account numbers, credit card numbers, routing numbers
• Government IDs: Social Security Numbers, passport numbers, driver's license numbers
• Medical data: medical record numbers, diagnoses, prescription information
• Signatures: handwritten signatures can be used for forgery
• Confidential business data: internal codes, product plans, personnel details

Redaction best practices

Solid black rectangles are the standard for secure redaction. Blurring and pixelation are not secure: computational techniques can partially reverse them to recover the original content, particularly for text and numbers. For sensitive documents, always use an opaque fill. Additionally:

• Redact all instances of the same information throughout the document
• Zoom in to verify coverage - partial coverage of text may still be readable
• Do not rely on blurring alone for legally required redactions

Legal requirements

Proper redaction is legally mandated in several contexts:

• HIPAA: US healthcare records must protect 18 categories of patient identifiers
• GDPR: EU personal data must be protected; failure can result in fines up to 4% of global annual revenue
• FOIA responses: US government agencies must redact certain categories before releasing documents
• Court filings: many courts require redaction of SSNs, financial account numbers, and birth dates

Format note

This tool downloads a flattened PNG. It redraws the image into a browser canvas, so the downloaded copy does not retain the original image's EXIF metadata. To make a JPEG or WebP copy, convert the redacted PNG with the Image Format Converter after applying the redactions.

Never share the original unredacted file alongside the redacted version. If the source was a PDF or Word document, recreate it from the redacted image rather than placing a cover over the original text; hidden layers in some formats can be removed to expose the underlying content.