STERILIZER_

CLEAN A PHOTO BEFORE YOU SHARE IT — NO PHOTO IS UPLOADED

Blur the faces in a photo

It finds the faces for you, and you can drag a box over anything it missed. What goes under the blocks is discarded, not hidden.

Drop a photo here

or click to browse — JPEG, PNG, WEBP, HEIC*

*HEIC only where the browser supports it (Safari).

  • The photo stays on this device. There is no image server to send it to.
  • Crop it, drop the colour, cover the faces and anything else that identifies.
  • The file you download carries no location, serial number or name.

Pixelation rather than blur

This tool pixelates instead of blurring, and the difference matters. A light blur is a filter applied over detail that is still mathematically present, and a weak one can sometimes be partly reversed.

Each block here takes the average colour of the area beneath it, and only that average is written to the file you download. The detail is not obscured, it is gone — there is nothing in the exported image to recover it from.

The face finder is not exhaustive

A small model runs on your own machine and marks the faces it can see. It reliably finds faces looking towards the camera in reasonable light, and it misses faces turned away, far off, in shadow, or partly covered.

It tells you how many it found rather than claiming it found them all. Check the result, and drag a box over anything it missed.

A face is not the only thing that identifies someone

A covered face still leaves a tattoo, a name badge, a uniform, a distinctive jacket, a car registration, a letter on the table, a screen with an inbox open on it.

You can drag a box over any of these, and the same destructive pixelation applies. If you are covering faces because the photo is going somewhere public, it is worth a second look at the background before you export.

Questions

Can a pixelated face be reversed?
Not from the exported file. Only the averaged colour of each block is written, so the original detail is not present in any form. Reversal attempts that work in research settings rely on the original pixels still being there under a filter.
Does the face detection send my photo anywhere?
No. The model is about 230 KB and ships with the page, running on your own processor. The model travels to you; your photo does not travel to it.
Can I cover something that is not a face?
Yes. Drag a box over anything — a number plate, a document, a screen, a tattoo — and it is pixelated the same way.
How strong should the blocks be?
The block size control sets how coarse they are. Larger blocks remove more detail. For a face that needs to be genuinely unrecognisable rather than merely obscured, err coarser.