Cover something up, properly
Draw a box over a face, an address or an account number and the pixels underneath are replaced, not hidden.
- Add
- Adjust
- Make
- Keep
How to use this tool
- Add your files — drag them onto the page or choose them. They stay on your device.
- Choose what to strip: location, camera and authorship metadata, embedded thumbnails, or everything non-essential.
- Run it on JPEG, PNG or WebP images, video or audio; images are edited without re-encoding and media is rewritten without re-encoding, so quality is untouched.
- Press “Process files” and download the results, individually or as one ZIP.
About this tool
Draw a box over a face, an address or an account number and the pixels underneath are replaced, not hidden. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is recoverable. Everything is analysed and produced on your own device — nothing is uploaded anywhere, and you can verify it: the tools keep working even offline.
Privacy & limitations
Redaction covers the file's metadata, not its pixels: faces, number plates and screens in the image itself need the PDF redaction tool or a manual edit. Re-muxed video keeps its streams byte-identical where the container allows; some exotic metadata inside streams can survive a container-only strip — leak-check verifies. The categories are precise for EXIF only. XMP blocks mix location, device and author fields, so ticking any of those removes XMP whole; video and audio lose every container tag whichever boxes are ticked. Other image formats (HEIC, AVIF, GIF, TIFF and the rest) are not accepted — convert them to JPEG or PNG first.
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Frequently asked questions
Can a blurred or pixelated image be un-blurred?
Often, yes, when the hidden content is drawn from a small set of possibilities. Both are reversible transforms, so an attacker can blur every candidate — every account number, every plate — and look for the one that produces the same output. This has been done to real redactions. A solid block has no such weakness because the original pixels are simply gone.
Why not just draw a black rectangle in an image editor?
On an image that is the same thing, as long as you export a flattened file. The classic failure is doing it in a document or a PDF, where the box is an object drawn on top and the text underneath is still there to be selected, searched or copied out.
Does the redaction survive editing afterwards?
Yes. The output is a new image whose pixels have been replaced, so there is no layer to remove and no original underneath. It is not an overlay.
Is the metadata removed too?
No, that is a separate job. If the photograph also carries GPS coordinates or a camera serial number, run it through Remove Metadata afterwards, since covering a face in the picture does nothing about the location recorded in the file.
Does the image get uploaded?
No. It is decoded, drawn and re-encoded in this tab. There is no upload endpoint to send it to, which for a tool whose whole job is sensitive pictures is rather the point.