Blur faces — without uploading the photo
A small detector finds the faces on your own machine. You check the boxes, fix what it missed, and the photo never goes anywhere.
The whole reason you are blurring a photo is that somebody in it should not be identifiable — a child, a bystander, a colleague, someone at a protest. Every other free face blurrer asks you to upload that exact photo to a server first, which is a strange way to protect it. This one downloads a 0.4MB detector once and runs it in your browser. It proposes boxes rather than applying them, because automatic detection always misses somebody, and a tool that quietly claimed to have handled it would be the dangerous design.
Is my photo uploaded?
No. The face detector is downloaded to your browser and runs on your own device, and the blurring happens on a canvas in the page. The uploads counter in the top bar stays at 0. This matters more here than almost anywhere else — the reason you are blurring a photo is that someone in it should not be identified, and every other free face blurrer asks you to send them that exact photo first.
Does it find every face?
No, and no automatic detector does. It is good on faces looking roughly at the camera, and it will miss profiles, faces in shadow, very small faces at the back of a crowd, and anyone in a mask or heavy sunglasses. That is why it only proposes boxes: you see every one before anything is applied, and you drag boxes over whatever it missed. A tool that quietly said it had handled it would be the dangerous design.
Can the blur be reversed?
The exported file is a fresh image with those pixels resampled away, so there is no hidden original underneath to recover — unlike drawing a black shape in a document, which anyone can move aside. Be aware that weak pixelation over known content, like a short number plate, can sometimes be attacked by brute force. For a face, at these strengths, that is not realistic. If you want a guarantee rather than a judgement, use the solid option, which replaces the region outright.
What happens to the EXIF data?
It is dropped. The image is re-encoded from a canvas, which carries no metadata, so the GPS coordinates, camera serial and timestamp do not survive the export. Blurring a face but publishing the coordinates of the house it was taken in would not be much of a win. If you only want the metadata gone and no blurring, the EXIF viewer and stripper shows you what is in there first.
How big is the download?
About 0.4MB for the detector, once, then cached by your browser and this site's service worker. You can also skip it entirely and draw the boxes by hand — the tool works fully without ever loading the model.
Do I need an account?
No. No signup, no watermark, and no limit on how many photos you do.
Going the whole way before you post
Strip the hidden metadata with the EXIF viewer and stripper, blur the faces here, and if the thing you are publishing is a document rather than a photo, redact the PDF so the text underneath is destroyed rather than covered.