Three ways to blur an image
Whole image softens every pixel evenly, which suits backgrounds for text, wallpapers and dreamy effects. Selected areas leaves the photo sharp and blurs only the boxes you drag on it, the usual choice for hiding a face or a license plate. All but selected does the opposite: it keeps your boxes sharp and blurs the rest, so the subject stands out.
Boxes can overlap and there is no limit to how many you add. Undo last area removes the most recent box, Clear areas starts again, and every change shows on the preview straight away, so you can see the result before downloading.
How to blur faces, plates and personal details
Choose Selected areas and drag a box over each face, license plate, house number, name badge or screen that should not be recognizable. Photos of crowds, children, street scenes and neighbors’ property are the typical cases, and Google blurs faces and license plates in its own Street View imagery for the same reason.
Screenshots need the same care. Email addresses, phone numbers, order numbers, chat names and notifications are easy to overlook, so read the whole picture once more before sharing it, and blur anything that identifies someone who has not agreed to be shown.
How strong should the blur be
Strength is measured against the size of the image, so the same number looks the same on a small screenshot and on a 24-megapixel photo, and the preview matches the downloaded file. Around 10 gives a soft background, and 25 or more makes faces and words unreadable in most pictures.
Use a strong setting for anything sensitive. Researchers showed in 2016 that neural networks trained on blurred and pixelated pictures could still recognize faces and handwritten digits hidden by blurring and pixelation. For passwords, card numbers and other secrets, crop them out of the picture altogether rather than relying on any blur.
Blur the background to make the subject stand out
All but selected imitates the shallow depth of field of a portrait lens. Draw a box around the person or product, pick a medium strength, and the surroundings melt away while the subject stays crisp. Several boxes can follow an irregular shape, such as a person with outstretched arms.
Boxes have straight edges, so the effect works best when some sharp background around the subject looks natural. For a precise outline, cut the subject out with the AI background remover and place it over a blurred copy of the same photo in any editor.
Blurred backgrounds for text, slides and wallpapers
Text is much easier to read on a blurred photo than on a detailed one. Blur a picture of your office, a product or a landscape and use it behind a quote, a presentation title, a website header or a phone lock screen, where it adds color and mood without competing with the words.
A blurred picture also makes a smaller file. JPG spends most of its bytes on fine detail, so once the detail is gone the same image often saves at a fraction of its original size, which helps slides and web pages load faster.
Blur or pixelate?
Both hide detail, but they look different. A blur smooths an area into soft color and draws little attention, which suits faces in the background of a holiday photo. Pixelation turns the area into visible squares, a look people read as deliberate censoring, familiar from news footage and redacted screenshots.
For privacy the strength matters more than the style: a large blur and large blocks both hide far more than mild settings of either. If you prefer the blocky look, the free image pixelator on this site works the same way, in your browser, with a block size slider instead of a blur strength.
How the blur image tool works
The tool uses stack blur, a fast approximation of a Gaussian blur, from the open-source StackBlur library. At the edges of the picture it repeats the border pixels instead of mixing in empty space, so borders stay solid rather than fading to a dark or transparent rim.
Each marked area is blurred together with a margin around it, and only the box itself is written back. That keeps the edge of the box blending with its surroundings instead of looking like a patch stuck on top of the photo.
Tips for a natural-looking result
Make boxes a little larger than the thing you want hidden, since hair, ears and plate frames can also give people away. For a background blur, start around strength 8 to 12; very strong settings look artificial next to a sharp subject.
Check the full-size result after downloading, particularly on large photos, where a small face in the preview can be bigger than it seems. If you blur a photo for social media, blur the original file, not a screenshot of it, so the rest of the picture keeps its quality.
Privacy, formats and metadata
Everything happens in your browser, so the photo you are protecting is never uploaded anywhere. The tool opens JPG, PNG, WebP, AVIF and HEIC files, and saves PNG or JPG.
Downloaded files are written without EXIF data. That matters for privacy too: a blurred photo that still carried its GPS coordinates could reveal where it was taken, even with every face hidden.