Cover a face or an address on a photo

Drag over the part you want to cover and it fills with blocks, a blur, or one flat colour. The rest of the photo is untouched. No account, no watermark, and the photo never leaves your device — which is the point, for the kind of photo you cover things up in.

Drop your picture here

or click to browse. JPG, PNG, WebP and AVIF, with no size cap. Stays on your device.

You choose the part

Drag over one thing or five: two faces, an address and a phone number. Everything you do not drag over stays exactly as it was.

No signup, no watermark

No account, no trial, no upgrade prompt on the download. Ads pay for the site.

Nothing is uploaded

The photo stays on your device. Cut the Wi-Fi once you have dropped it and it still works.

The camera details go too

A phone photo carries a hidden note of where it was taken. The copy you download does not have it.

How it works

  1. Drop your photo, or click the box to choose a file.
  2. Drag across the part you want to cover. Drag again for another part. Press one to select it, then drag it to move it or a corner handle to change its size.
  3. Turn the photo a quarter turn if you want to, with Turn left or Turn right. The areas you covered turn with it.
  4. Pick Blocks, Blur or Solid, and set the block size if you want one size everywhere. You can change your mind after dragging; the picture updates as you look at it.
  5. Press Cover and download and save the result.

Fixing the block size, and what a size covers

Out of the box the blocks are sized against the area you drag, so a tight box round an account number and a wide box round a face each get blocks that suit them. Plenty of people would rather have one size everywhere, so the block size row lets you set one. The sizes on offer are read off your own photo, because a block that covers a name on a small picture is a speck on a 12 megapixel one.

A fixed size is used exactly as you set it, on a small box and on a box that fills the photo. What changes with the box is not the cover but what we can tell you about it. What decides whether lettering is still readable is not the block size on its own but the block against the height of the letters: we put a phone number through more than three hundred rounds of this and the line came out at about one to four, so a 30 px block covers letters up to roughly 120 px tall. The tool cannot see how tall the letters in your photo are — all it knows is that they fit inside the box you drew. So when a box is wider than the size covers, the note under the size row says which and how wide, and leaves the call to you. You are the one who can see the photo.

Blocks, a blur, or a solid fill

Blocks keep the shape and the colours of the photo, so the result still looks like a photo with something covered in it. That reads better, and it is what most people want.

A blur is the gentler look: no hard squares, just a smudge. It is also the softest of the three, because smearing spreads what was there across the neighbouring pixels rather than throwing it away. The size row drives the blur as well, and at the same setting a blur reaches a little further up the letter heights than blocks do, so the note under the row is on the cautious side for it.

A solid fill does not keep anything of what was underneath — the area becomes one flat colour. It looks blunter. If what is under there matters more to you than how the photo looks, that is the one to use.

What you get back

The same width and height in pixels, and the same kind of file you dropped. Making the copy re-saves the whole photo, so a JPG is written again at high quality; the change is smaller than the one the photo already went through inside the camera, and the file usually comes out a little lighter.

The hidden block of camera details does not survive that step. On a phone photo that block often holds the place it was taken, so the copy you hand over does not carry it.

Frequently asked questions

Can the covered part be brought back?

The three choices are not equal, and here is the order. Solid replaces the area with one flat colour, so nothing of what was underneath is left in the file. Blocks replace it with an average, so less is left the bigger the blocks are. Blur only smears it — the original is still spread across those pixels, and smearing is the easiest of the three to work backwards from. There is published work on reconstructing pixelated text, and we have not measured it here, so we will not tell you a mosaic cannot be undone. If you want none of the picture left in that spot, pick Solid.

Can I fix the block size instead of letting it change?

Yes. Under the picture there is a block size row: leave it on "Sized to each area" and every box gets blocks scaled to itself, or pick one of the three pixel sizes and every box you draw gets exactly that. The sizes offered are worked out from your photo, because the same 30 px is a heavy cover on a small picture and almost nothing on a 12 megapixel one.

What happens if I drag a box much bigger than the block size I picked?

You still get exactly the size you picked — fixed means fixed, at every box size. What the tool does instead is tell you what that size is measured to cover. We put a phone number through more than three hundred rounds of this: what decides whether lettering can still be read back is the block against the height of the letters, and the line sits at about one to four, so a 30 px block covers letters up to about 120 px tall. When a box is wider than that, a note under the size row says so, because the tool cannot see how tall the letters in your photo are and you can. Draw a tighter box or pick a bigger size if the lettering in there is large.

Can I cover more than one thing, and undo?

Drag as many areas as you need — two faces, or an address and a phone number. Undo and Redo sit under the picture, and the keyboard works too: Ctrl+Z to undo and Ctrl+Shift+Z or Ctrl+Y to redo, or ⌘Z and ⇧⌘Z on a Mac.

I drew an area slightly off. Can I move it instead of starting again?

Press the area to select it. An outline and four round handles appear: drag anywhere inside it to move it, drag a handle to change its size, and press Remove area — or the Delete key — to take it off. Press an empty part of the photo to let go of it again. Pressing an area used to remove it straight away, which meant a stray touch could uncover a face without telling you; now it selects, and removing is a button you choose.

Can I turn the photo?

Yes, a quarter turn at a time, with Turn left and Turn right under the picture. Areas you have already covered turn with the photo and stay over the same part of it. The file you download is turned the same way you left it on screen, at the same number of pixels with the two sides swapped for a quarter turn. Undo steps back through turns as well.

Does it work on a phone?

Yes. Drag with your finger over the part you want to cover, and the page will not scroll while you are dragging on the picture. Selecting, moving and resizing an area work with a finger too: the four corner handles have a 44 pixel target around them, so you do not have to be precise to grab one.

Is my photo uploaded to a server?

No. The work happens on your own device. You can switch your network off after you drop the picture and it will still finish. For a photo you are covering something up in, that is the whole point.

What happens to the details my camera stored?

They are not in the copy you download. A photo carries a hidden block of camera details, and on a phone that often includes the place it was taken. The picture is redrawn to make the result, and the redrawn copy has none of that.

Does the picture stay the same size and format?

The width and height in pixels are unchanged, and the file comes back as the kind of file you dropped. The one exception is a format your browser cannot write at all: then it is saved as a PNG and told to you on the result, never swapped quietly.

Does it add a watermark or need an account?

No watermark, no account, no trial, and no upgrade prompt on the download. The site is free and paid for by ads.

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