You blur faces in a photo by hiding each face with blur, pixelation or a solid fill, then saving the result. Face Blur does this in your browser: the faces are found on your device, you check and adjust every one, and the photos are never uploaded.
The important part is the checking. Face detection finds where faces are, but a face turned away, half behind someone's shoulder or tiny in the background can slip past it. That is why you look over each photo before you save.
What 'blur faces in photo' actually requires
A useful blur has to do two things at once: hide the face completely, and survive the save. A light smudge over a face can be reversed or partly read on a good screen. Real anonymizing means the detail is gone from the file you share, not just softened on yours.
Face Blur works at the photo's own size, up to 16.7 megapixels, and keeps the original format. At the default strength a face is shrunk to a few pixels across and spread back out, so the saved photo holds no readable face detail. You can also Pixelate or Fill with a solid colour, in an Oval or a Box, at five strengths.
How to blur faces in a photo, step by step
- Open Face Blur. The page shows a drop zone labelled 'Drag & drop or browse', under the line 'Processed locally — your files never leave your device'. There is no upload step.
- Add your file, or drag several photos onto the drop zone at once. JPG, PNG and WebP are supported, and HEIC where your browser opens it. Batch work is fine: free plans process up to 3 files per batch without an account or 5 with one, and a whole batch counts as a single run.
- Wait for the face finder to finish. A small detection model runs on your device; the browser downloads it once from Alvseike and keeps it for next time. It finds where faces are, never who they are — nothing is recognized, compared or kept.
- Check every photo. Each face found is hidden and outlined. Click a face to leave it visible if it belongs to someone who agreed to be in the picture. Move or resize a box that sits wrong, or remove one.
- Hide what the finder missed. Drag across a face turned away, mostly hidden or tiny in the background to draw a box over it yourself.
- If a number plate, badge, sign or screen is in frame, press 'Find text and number plates too'. It reads the text in every photo on your device and hides each line in a box labelled with what was read. It is pressed, not automatic, and anything it does not read you draw by hand.
- Choose how to hide: Blur, Pixelate or Fill, in an Oval or a Box, at one of five strengths. Blur at the default is the safest general choice; Fill is clearest when the face does not matter at all.
- Save. Photos come back at their own size and format, and several photos arrive as one zip. The saved copy holds none of the original's location, camera or date. Downloading is one run, however many photos are in it.
Hide faces in a group photo without ruining it
Group photos are the hard case, because there are more faces, more angles and usually at least one person who did not agree to be in the shot. A few habits help:
- Decide who stays visible before you start. Clicking a face to leave it visible is quicker than hiding everything and then trying to undo it.
- Scan the edges and the back row. Faces at the frame edge, in shadow or turned to the side are the ones detection most often misses, and they are exactly the faces a passer-by would notice.
- Use Fill for strangers in the background and Blur for people whose identity matters less than their presence. A solid fill reads as deliberate; a heavy blur can look like a smudge.
- Check reflective surfaces. A window, a mirror or a phone screen can carry a face the finder never sees as a face. Drag a box over it.
Why in-browser face blurring beats upload-based tools
When you upload a photo to a website that blurs faces on its server, the unblurred original leaves your device. That is the opposite of what you are trying to achieve: the whole point is that the photo should not circulate. A server-side tool also tends to add a watermark, cap file size, or keep the file for some period you cannot verify.
Face Blur runs the detection model and the blur inside the page. Your photos are opened from your own machine and never sent anywhere. There is no file-size cap, no watermark and no account needed to start. The trade-off is honest: your device does the work, so a very large batch takes as long as your computer takes.
Speed is the other gain. There is no upload wait and no download queue — the photo is already there. On a phone with a good connection to nothing at all, it still works, because nothing is being fetched except the model the first time.
If you need to change a photo's format before or after blurring, Universal Converter handles PNG, JPG, WebP, AVIF and HEIC in the browser. If the shot needs reframing first, Smart Cropper crops to any ratio with smart guides and no upload. And if you are anonymizing a logo or icon rather than a face, Image to SVG traces it into clean vector paths.
Common mistakes when you anonymize faces in photos
- Saving before checking. The finder is good, not perfect. Look over every photo, especially the background.
- Blurring too lightly. A faint blur can leave a face recognizable on a large screen. Use the default or stronger.
- Leaving the name badge readable. Press 'Find text and number plates too', or draw over the badge by hand.
- Assuming the original is safe because the copy is. The blurred file is clean; the original on your device is not. Share the blurred copy only.
- Using the wrong tool for video. Face Blur is for still photos. Video is a separate tool, Video Face Blur, and neither promises to find every face or every line of text in motion.
- Re-saving the same photo repeatedly. Blur, save, re-open and blur again softens the whole image. Do it once, at full resolution.
One thing worth knowing about the saved copy: it holds none of the original's location, camera or date. That is a property of the export, not of the face finder — the finder only ever locates where faces are, and never identifies who they belong to.
A quick comparison
| Face Blur (in-browser) | Typical upload-based blur tool | |
|---|---|---|
| Where photos go | Stay on your device | Sent to a server |
| File-size cap | None | Often capped |
| Watermark | None | Common on free tiers |
| Metadata in the saved copy | Removed | Varies, often kept |
| Batch | Up to 3 files free, 5 with an account | Varies |
| Cost | Free daily allowance, Pro for unlimited | Free tier plus paid plans |
Pro tips for a clean result
Work at full resolution and save once, at the end, rather than blurring, saving, re-opening and blurring again. When several photos share the same setting, batch them so the whole set is one run. And keep a plain, unblurred original somewhere private if you may need it later; the blurred copy is the one that leaves your hands.
Free use is metered at 5 runs a day, and a free account raises that to 15. A run is one export, however many files it contains, so batching is the cheapest way to work. If you blur faces often, the pricing page explains the Pro plan, which unlocks unlimited daily use and removes the batch cap. Working offline, by installing the site as an app, is a Pro feature.
Once you have the habit of checking each photo rather than trusting the finder, blurring faces stops being a chore and becomes a two-minute step before anything goes public.