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Free tool | 100% Local

Blur license plates in a photo

Drop a car photo and every plate is found and blurred for you — free, in your browser. The picture never leaves your device: no upload, no account, no watermark.

100% local — the photo never leaves your device.

How it works

  1. Drop, paste or pick a photo — a car you are selling, a street scene, a parking lot, a dashcam still.

  2. Plates are found on your device in a few seconds and blurred straight away. Remove a box, 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.

When to blur a license plate

A plate is the one detail in a car photo that links the car to its registered owner. People usually hide it when:

  • Selling a car

    Marketplace and classified listings stay up for weeks and get copied by other sites. A buyer needs to see the car, not its registration.

  • Posting on social media

    Car meets, road trips and new-car photos, where the plate adds nothing and can point to where you live and park.

  • Street and travel photos

    Other people's cars in the background of a blog post, a review or a real-estate listing.

  • Incidents and evidence

    A parking dispute or a bad driver shared publicly: blur the cars that are not the point, and give the originals to the insurer or the police.

In the EU, a plate that can be linked to a person is generally treated as personal data under the GDPR — one reason Street View blurs plates. In the US plates are public, and blurring them is a precaution rather than a rule.

Can a blurred license plate be read?

Sometimes. A plate is short, high-contrast and set in a known typeface, which makes it one of the easiest things to reconstruct from a light blur or coarse pixels — the same weakness we measured for blurred text. The tool therefore scales the blur to the height of each plate, and you can push the strength further.

For a car you are selling, or anything sensitive, use pixelate at a high strength or a solid box. Then check what else gives the car away: a dealer frame, a parking permit, the VIN behind the windshield, a house number in the background.

Read our blur recovery study

Faces, VINs and everything else

Auto-detect here finds license plates only. For a VIN, a parking permit, a house number or a sticker in the shot, drag a box over it — the same effect is applied, and the result is flattened into one PNG.

People in the photo too? The face blur tool finds every face the same way.

Why nothing gets uploaded

Plate blurring sites that upload your photo keep, for however long, a copy of exactly the car you want kept private. 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. The detector only finds where plates are — it never reads the number — and nothing about the photo is sent anywhere.

Hiding text instead? Use the image blur tool for screenshots, or redact a PDF for documents such as a registration or a sales contract.

Blurring your screen instead of a photo?

If you share your screen or record demos, blur the live page before it is ever captured — a listing, a name or a whole panel, one click in the browser.

FAQ

No. Plate detection, blurring and export all run in your browser. The detection model is fetched from this site once; after that the photo is processed entirely on your device and never sent anywhere.

It finds most plates seen from the front, the back or at an angle, including small ones in a row of parked cars — the photo is scanned in overlapping sections for that. Very small, blurry or steeply angled plates can be missed, and a sign with bold lettering sometimes gets a box too, so check the result before you download.

A lightly blurred plate can sometimes be read — a plate has few characters in a known font. For anything sensitive use pixelate at a high strength or a solid box. The tool already scales the blur to each plate's size.

It is rarely required, but many sellers do: a listing stays online for weeks, gets copied by other sites, and the plate tells a buyer nothing about the car. Show the plate and the VIN to a serious buyer in person.

It looks for the shape of a plate rather than reading the characters, so it is not tied to one format — European and US plates both worked in our tests. Unusual shapes are worth a check by hand.

No — this tool works on photos. For video you need an editor with motion tracking. A single frame, such as a dashcam still, works here like any other photo.

Yes. It is a regular web page, so it runs in Safari or Chrome on your phone. On a large photo, detection can take a few seconds on older devices.

Free, with no sign-up and no watermark. JPG, PNG and WebP open directly; iPhone HEIC photos usually need converting first. The result downloads as a PNG.