Why hide faces before sharing?
Most photos worth sharing have more people in them than the one person who agreed to be in them. The grandchildren visiting Grandma are happy to be photographed — that does not mean their faces belong on a public Facebook post. The school or church newsletter wants the picnic picture, but three families in the background never signed anything. You are selling a car or a couch, and your neighbour's child, your house number and your number plate are all in frame. In each case the fix is the same, and it takes half a minute: cover the faces (and plates, and badges) before the photo goes anywhere. That is the whole job this tool does.
It does the finding for you. When you choose a photo, a face-detection model looks over the picture and marks every face it can find — one person or a whole group — and covers each one. The covering is deliberately a little wider than the face itself, so forehead and chin are covered too. Then you stay in charge: click any covered face to uncover it (grandma stays visible, the grandchildren stay hidden), drag your own boxes over anything the model missed, and choose how the hiding looks.
Three ways to hide
- Pixelate — the face becomes a mosaic of chunky blocks. This is the standard for public sharing: the detail is destroyed, not just disguised, and it cannot be undone from the picture you publish.
- Soft blur — a gentler smudge that suits family pictures. Push the Strength slider up for anything public; a light blur on a sharp photo can leave more visible than you'd like.
- Black box — a solid rectangle that hides everything under it, completely. The right choice for number plates, name badges, house numbers and documents.
One honest warning about all three: hiding works on the copy you download, not on the photo in your camera roll. Share the downloaded picture — the one from this page — not the original.
Pair it with the Metadata Remover
A photo carries more than faces. Most phone photos quietly store where and when they were taken — your home address, in effect — inside the file. Before you post a picture publicly, run it through our Photo Metadata Remover as well: it shows you what is hidden in the file and strips it out. Faces hidden here, location stripped there, and the picture is genuinely safe to share. And if the background itself gives too much away — a house, a street, a workplace — the Background Remover can take the whole background out.
Frequently asked questions
Is my photo uploaded anywhere?
No. Face detection and blurring run entirely in your browser, on your device. The face model (a 232 KB file) is downloaded once from this site; your photo never leaves your device, and you can verify it by loading the page and then switching your internet off.
What if it misses a face?
Very small faces, faces turned far away from the camera, or faces deep in shadow can be missed. Press "Add a box", then drag a rectangle over anything that still needs hiding — a face, a number plate, a name badge. Every box is hidden in the download exactly like a detected face.
Can I leave one face visible?
Yes. Click any hidden face and it becomes visible again (its outline turns red so you can see the exception). Click it once more to hide it again. Useful for group photos where one person is happy to be seen and the rest are not.
Which hiding style should I use?
Pixelate is the classic choice for photos you share publicly — the face cannot be reconstructed from it. Soft blur looks gentler and suits family pictures, but a strong blur is safer than a light one. Black box hides absolutely everything in the rectangle and is best for documents, plates and badges.
Does it work on group photos?
Yes — it looks for every face in the picture, not just the biggest one. In our tests a group portrait of seven people had all seven faces found. Very wide crowd shots with tiny faces may need a few manual boxes added.
Related tools
- Photo Metadata Remover — strip the hidden location and camera data from a photo.
- Background Remover — take the whole background out of a photo.
- Image Compressor — shrink the finished picture for email or upload limits.
- Image to Text (OCR) — pull the words out of a photo or screenshot.