Redact an image

A cover that stays covered

A black box drawn on top of an image in a photo viewer or a slideshow tool often only hides the content visually while you look at it; the original pixels are still there underneath, in a layer that can be moved, deleted or, in some tools, recovered entirely. When the whole point is to hide something before sharing an image, that is not good enough. This tool changes the actual pixels, so what is covered is genuinely gone from the file you download.

How to use it

Drop your image, then click and drag over each area you want to hide; a box appears as you drag. Draw as many boxes as you need, undo the last one if you make a mistake, or clear everything and start over. When you are ready, press apply: every box is drawn permanently into the image, and the result downloads immediately.

Solid color or pixelation

A solid color, black by default but any color you choose, completely replaces the covered area with no trace of what was underneath. Pixelation shrinks the covered area down and blows it back up, leaving a blocky, unreadable version that still hints at shapes and colors, which can look more natural for some uses, such as blurring a background face, while still making details like text genuinely unreadable.

Why this differs from a screenshot annotation tool

Many built-in screenshot and annotation tools draw shapes as an editable layer on top of the image, which stays reversible until the file is flattened or exported in a format that bakes it in, and it is easy to forget that step. Here, applying a box is the only way to see the final result, so there is no separate export step to miss.

Limits and privacy

This covers rectangular areas you choose by hand; it does not detect faces or text automatically. For that, the screenshot privacy checker reads text in an image and suggests areas to redact. Everything here happens in your browser, and the image is never uploaded.