Blur Image Free — Blur Face, Blur Part of Image, or Full Blur

Blur a whole photo — or just the part that matters

This is a free online tool to blur an image two ways. Full Image Blur softens the entire photo with one slider; Select Area lets you draw a rectangle to blur part of a photo — a face, a license plate, a home address — while everything else stays sharp. Most free editors only give you the whole-image version and lock the selective, region-by-region blur behind a paid plan; here both are free, with no signup and no upload.

Once the image looks right you can shrink the file size before you post it, or stamp it with a watermark.

How the blur actually works (and why nothing leaves your device)

When you drop in a picture, the browser’s FileReader loads it straight into the page and paints it onto an HTML <canvas>. Your photo is never uploaded to a server — the entire blur happens inside your own browser tab, so a private snapshot, an ID scan, or a chat screenshot never leaves your device. You can even disconnect from the internet once the page has loaded and it still works.

In Full Image mode the canvas applies a single blur() filter over the whole picture. In Select Area mode, each rectangle you draw becomes a clip region, and the blur is painted only inside it — so you can obscure a face and leave the rest untouched. It is a Gaussian-style soft blur, not a pixelation mosaic. When you click Download, the blurred canvas is exported with toDataURL(), which flattens the effect permanently into the pixels: the saved file has no hidden original layer sitting underneath the blur.

If you would like a step-by-step walkthrough with pictures, read our guide to how to blur part of a photo.

What to blur before you post a photo or screenshot

Select Area mode is built for privacy: every time you click and drag you add another region, and each one shows up in a numbered list below the image where you can remove it or clear them all. Draw as many as the picture needs — here are the things people most often forget to hide.

Faces

Drag a rectangle over each face to blur a face without cropping the whole shot. Add one region per person when there is more than one.

License plates

Number plates in car-sale listings, driveway photos, or street scenes tie a vehicle to a person — blur them before the picture goes public.

Home addresses and house numbers

Door numbers, street signs, and package labels quietly reveal where you live. A single region over each one is enough.

IDs, documents, and signatures

Passport and account numbers, tax IDs, and signatures on a scan should be blurred region by region before you attach the image to an email or a support ticket.

Chat and app screenshots

Usernames, avatars, phone numbers, and email addresses in a DM screenshot expose other people. Blur each handle so you can share the conversation, not the identities.

How strong should the blur be?

The three presets map to a fixed radius, and the slider goes from 0 to 50 px if you want to fine-tune it. Bigger regions and higher-resolution images need a larger radius to fully hide detail, so match the setting to the job:

The honest part: a light blur can sometimes be undone

A blur is not a black box. A weak, low-radius blur — and, even more so, a coarse pixelation mosaic — leaves behind enough structure that de-blurring and “depix” tools can sometimes recover a rough version of what was hidden, especially for short, predictable text like a PIN or a plate. That is why you should never rely on a Subtle or Medium setting to anonymise something that genuinely matters.

For real anonymisation, use the Heavy preset (25 px) or push the slider higher, then check the preview: if you cannot read or recognise the region yourself, a large enough radius has destroyed enough detail to make recovery impractical. The good news is that this tool bakes the blur straight into the exported pixels, so there is no original layer hidden inside the download waiting to be peeled back — the only thing that matters is choosing a radius strong enough for the content.

When not to use this tool

This tool blurs raster images, and you place every region by hand — it does not detect faces automatically, so it is not the right pick if you have hundreds of photos to process in bulk. If you are trying to redact text inside a PDF, blurring a screenshot of it is safer than blurring in the PDF itself, where the real selectable text can still sit under the mark; flatten the page to an image first, then blur it here. And if your goal is to remove an object entirely rather than soften it, a blur will still show a shape where the thing was — that is a different job. For everything else — hiding a face, a plate, an address, or a name before a photo or screenshot goes online — drawing a heavy blur over the region here is fast, free, and private.

Frequently asked questions