Image Tools
Image Region Redactor - Blur or Pixelate Sensitive Areas
Draw rectangles over sensitive areas in a photo and apply blur, pixelation, or black-fill redaction. Works entirely in your browser - no uploads required.
Click to upload an image
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
After redacting, save as a flat image file (PNG or JPEG) with no layers. Never share the original unredacted file alongside the redacted version. If the document was originally a PDF or Word document, recreate it from the redacted image rather than exporting with an invisible layer on top - hidden layers in some formats can be removed to expose redacted content.