Free · runs in your browser
Turn a whole picture, or only the parts that give something away, into big square blocks. Faces are found for you, and the photo never leaves your device.
Or pick one from your computer. JPEG, PNG, WebP and iPhone HEIC. Videos work too.Pick the picture from your photos or files.
Works with JPEGPNGWebPHEICand more
Faces are found and blurred on your device. Nothing is uploaded.
To pixelate an image, open the photo in the tool above, choose what to hide (Faces, Part of the photo or The whole photo) and leave Look on Pixelate. Raise Block size until nothing in the covered area can be made out, then press Export photo and Download photo. The picture is processed in your browser, so it is never uploaded anywhere.
Pixelation, also called a mosaic, replaces each square of the picture with one flat colour. The bigger the squares, the less of the original survives. You can apply it edge to edge for a deliberately blocky picture, or only to a face, a name badge, a screen or a number plate while the rest of the photo stays sharp.
Drop a JPEG, PNG or WebP onto the box above, or choose one from your files or photo library. iPhone HEIC photos open too.
Choose The whole photo, Faces (each face found gets its own oval), or Part of the photo and drag a box over what should go. Switch Draw with to Brush to paint over an odd shape.
Under Look, keep Pixelate selected and drag Block size. 16 px or more is a sensible floor for faces; go larger for text.
Press Export photo, then Download photo. Open Export settings first if you want PNG instead of JPEG, or a smaller size.
The three cards at the top of the editor cover the usual jobs. The whole photo pixelates every pixel, which suits a background picture, a teaser image or a screenshot you only want people to recognise by its layout. Faces runs the face finder and puts a pixelated oval on each person. Part of the photo is for everything else: drag a box over a car registration, a house number, a name on a lanyard or a chat window.
You are not limited to one area. Add box (or the A key) drops in another, and Brush lets you paint over something that is not rectangular, like a tattoo or a curved sign. Every area appears under Covered areas, where you can select it to move, resize or delete it.
Pixelation hides detail by averaging it, and how much detail is lost depends on how many original pixels fall into each block. A face that is 300 pixels wide covered with 8-pixel blocks still has almost 40 blocks across, which is plenty for a friend to recognise it. The same face with 32-pixel blocks keeps fewer than 10, and it becomes a smudge of skin tones.
Text deserves extra caution. Researchers have shown that lightly pixelated words can sometimes be recovered by trying candidate words in the same font and comparing the mosaics. For passwords, account numbers, addresses and plates, use a large Block size or switch that one area to Black under Look for this area, which leaves nothing to reconstruct.
Choose Faces and the editor looks for faces straight away, on your device. The detector (Google’s MediaPipe BlazeFace model) checks the whole picture and then overlapping tiles of it, so smaller faces at the back of a group are caught as well. Each face it finds becomes an oval called Face 1, Face 2 and so on.
Detection is good but not perfect. Faces in profile, in deep shadow, behind sunglasses and hats, or only a few pixels wide can be missed, so look over the whole picture before you save. Drag a box over anyone it skipped. To leave someone visible, pick their picture in the Faces list and turn off Hide this face.
Pixelate is the familiar mosaic from news footage: clearly deliberate, and harder to see through than a light blur. Blur looks softer and blends into the photo, which suits casual pictures where a grid would draw the eye. Black box removes the area completely.
You can mix them in one picture. Pick the main Look for most areas, then select any single area and change Look for this area to Pixelate, Blur or Black. A family photo might have pixelated faces, a black bar over a car registration and a blurred house number, all saved in one go. For a dedicated walkthrough of the soft option, see how to blur an image.
JPEG, PNG, WebP and AVIF open directly. HEIC, the iPhone default, opens directly in Safari and is converted on your device in other browsers, as are TIFF files; camera RAW files open as the full-size preview the camera stores inside them. Photos are turned the right way up using the orientation tag the camera wrote.
Export settings offers JPEG, PNG and, where the browser can write it, WebP. The photo is saved at its full size unless you pick a smaller one under Size; on iPhone and iPad, Safari limits a canvas to about 16.7 megapixels, so a larger photo is saved at the biggest size it allows. The saved copy carries none of the original’s EXIF data, so the camera model, the date and any GPS location are not passed on.
Not exactly: each block keeps only an average colour, so the detail inside is gone. Weak pixelation of a familiar face or a short word can still be guessed, though, so use big blocks or a black box for anything that really matters.
Choose Part of the photo and drag a box over the area, or switch Draw with to Brush and paint over it. Add as many areas as you need, then press Export photo.
Open this page in Safari, tap Choose photo and pick the picture from your library. Choose what to cover, then tap Export photo and Share or save to Photos to put the copy back in your library. The iPhone photo guide also covers the built-in Markup option.
Yes. Mosaic is the older name for the same effect, common in photo editors and broadcasting. Both replace small squares of the picture with flat blocks of colour.
Yes, unless you choose a smaller Size under Export settings. The one exception is Safari on iPhone and iPad, which caps a canvas at about 16.7 megapixels.
No. Opening, face finding, pixelating and saving all happen in your browser. The face detector model downloads once from this site; your picture is never sent.
Yes. Drop a video into the same box and you get the same looks, plus face tracking and timing for each area. Start with pixelating a video.