Blur faces in a photo automatically

1. Drop, paste or pick a photo: a group shot, a street scene, a screenshot with people in it.

2. Faces are found on your device in a few seconds and blurred straight away. Remove a box to keep that face, or drag your own over anything it missed.

3. Pick blur, pixelate or a solid box, adjust the strength, then download the result as a PNG.

Every face found gets its own box. To keep your own face, or someone who agreed to be shown, remove the box on that face and the others stay blurred. To do the opposite, remove every box except one. If a face in profile or in shadow was missed, drag a box over it by hand and the same effect is applied.

Small faces at the back of a group shot are the ones simple detectors miss. This tool also scans the photo in overlapping sections, so those small faces are still found. Each face starts with a blur scaled to its size, so a large face in the front gets a stronger blur than a small one at the back. Moving the Strength slider then sets one strength for every face. Check the result before you share: zoom in on the edges of the crowd.

The Photos app on an iPhone has no blur tool. Clean Up can pixelate a face, but only on iPhones with Apple Intelligence, and you cannot set how strong it is. On Android it depends on the phone. Open this page in Safari or Chrome, tap Choose a photo, and the faces are blurred on the phone itself. Tap Download PNG; on an iPhone the file lands in Files, Downloads. Detection can take a few seconds on an older phone. For the full walkthrough, see how to blur faces on iPhone.

Most photos worth sharing have someone in them who never agreed to be online. The usual cases:

• Children

  School, club and team photos, or your own kids' pictures in a public post.

• Bystanders

  Strangers in street, travel and event photos before they go on social media or a blog.

• Listings

  People caught in real-estate, rental or marketplace photos of a room, a car or an item for sale.

• Work and evidence

  Colleagues in office or event shots, and bystanders in photos you send to an insurer, a landlord or a platform.

In the EU a photo in which someone can be identified counts as personal data under the GDPR, so blurring faces is often the simplest way to share it without asking everyone in the frame.

Not always. A light blur softens a face without hiding it: people who know the person can often still recognise them, and research on face recognition has shown that lightly blurred or pixelated faces can be matched automatically. The tool therefore scales the blur to the size of each face, and you can push the strength further.

For anything sensitive, use pixelate at a high strength or a solid box, and remember what identifies someone besides the face — hair, tattoos, a name tag, a school logo, the place itself.

Read our blur recovery study

Auto-detect here finds faces only. For a house number, a badge or a phone screen in the shot, drag a box over it — the same effect is applied, and the result is flattened into one PNG. For text in screenshots, such as emails or card numbers, the image tool detects it for you.

Cars in the photo? The license plate blur tool finds every plate the same way.

Face blur sites that upload your photo keep, for however long, a copy of exactly the faces you want hidden. Here the detector runs in your browser: the model is downloaded once from this site, then the photo is analysed and blurred on your device and nothing about it is sent anywhere.

Hiding text instead? Blur part of an image for screenshots, or redact a PDF for documents.

The PNG you download here carries no metadata. Sharing the original photo as well? Remove its metadata — where it was taken, on which phone and when — without re-encoding it.

For a clip, use the video face blur: it tracks the faces across the frames, lets you keep your own face visible, and saves an MP4, with the sound kept when your browser can encode it, for clips up to 3 minutes.

If you edit in Premiere Pro, Final Cut, DaVinci Resolve, iMovie or CapCut, our guides show how to do it there, for example how to blur faces in Premiere Pro.