Pixelate Image Online & Blur Faces: Free Image Pixelator

How to pixelate an image with Image Pixelator

1

Add photos

Drop photos here, click Select photos, or paste with Ctrl+V. Faces are found automatically, and the status line tells you how many. No photo at hand? Try a sample.

2

Check the frames

Switch frames off, move them, or draw your own area with Rectangle, Ellipse or Brush. Before / After shows the photo with and without the effect.

3

Pick Pixelate, Blur or Solid

Set Strength between Light and Strong and click Download. The copy is saved under its old name plus -pixelated, for example beach-pixelated.jpg.

Pixelate faces, plates and any area

Frames, not baked-in blur

Image Pixelator frames each face it finds for you to check. Switch a frame off to keep a face visible, drag it or delete it. We make each frame 35% wider and 40% taller than the face to cover hair, ears and chin. The mask inside is an ellipse.

License plates

Faces and License plates under Find automatically are both on by default, giving number plates their own frames. Detection works on close and medium shots; a distant car may need a Rectangle drawn by hand. For dashcam footage, see blurring a license plate in a video.

Any area you point at

Rectangle, Ellipse and Brush let you censor part of a picture that automatic search skips, like a name tag on a jacket or a laptop screen in the background. The brush runs from 6 to 120 px and starts at 40.

Same size, same photo format

Your JPG keeps its width and height and is saved as JPG at quality 95. Every JPG save compresses it again; see the JPG format guide. PNG stays PNG and WebP stays WebP. A browser that cannot write WebP saves PNG and tells you.

HEIC from an iPhone

Open iPhone photos in HEIC without converting them first. The browser decodes the file if it can; otherwise, a bundled decoder takes over. You get a JPG.

Batch with one ZIP

Drop a set of photos together. Each keeps its own frames, edits and status from Queued to Checked. Next to review jumps to a photo that needs checking. Download ZIP saves the whole set as pixelated-photos.zip.

How much each effect hides

Choose from three settings with the Effect switch. One Strength slider controls how far they go.

Effect3
Strength2

Pixelate

The default pixelation is a mosaic effect: square blocks, each with one color. Big blocks hide the face and keep little more than the head's outline.

Blur

Softens the area into a smear. It looks gentler in a family photo, but a 2025 study of four methods rated plain Gaussian blur as the least private of them.

Solid

Paints the area with one color, near-black by default or any color you pick. Use it for text, card numbers and anything nobody should read.

Sized to the frame

Pixel block size follows each frame. By default, a block is one sixth of the frame's short side: a face frame 600 px across gets blocks about 100 px wide. A fixed small block barely hides a face in a big, sharp photo.

From Light to Strong

The slider sets block size from one eighth of the frame at Light to one quarter at Strong. Blocks never drop below 4 px, even on a tiny face.

Draw every frame or check ready ones

Phones and Windows come with a markup pen and shapes. If you need to blur a face in a photo once, that is enough.

The built-in way

Cover each face yourself

A table of 15 friends means 15 shapes, one at a time.
You get a pen and a few shapes, usually without pixelation.
A quick scribble often leaves an ear or the hairline in view.

VS

Image Pixelator

A face blur app in your browser

Pixelate or blur faces automatically: everything the detector found arrives marked, so all you do is check them. Keep the one person who may be seen, add the one it missed, and a single Strength setting covers the rest.

Blur faces online without uploading the picture

Your photo opens in this browser tab and stays on your device. Face and plate models load from softorbits.com, and the browser gives you the finished file. Your photo is never uploaded to our server or anywhere else.

Press F12, open the Network tab and add a photo. You will see the page, detection models and usage counters, with no request carrying your picture. The counters record numbers, such as how many faces were found, never file names or pixels.

Before you start

Small, covered or dark faces can be missed. Look over each photo and draw an area where a frame is missing.

Animated GIF or WebP: only the first frame opens, and it is saved as a still image.

On some phones and browsers a very large photo comes out as a full-size PNG or at a smaller size, with a note on screen.

One effect per photo: Pixelate, Blur or Solid applies to every area you mark.

AVIF, BMP and camera RAW files are not accepted. Convert them to JPG or PNG first.

Auto Video Redaction Software

Price

from $ 79.99 / month

Version

1.14

File Size

6.1 Mb

Last updated on

19/09/26

System Requirements

Windows 11/10/8.1/8/7 (32/64 bit)
Intel i3, AMD Ryzen 5 or above
4 GB of RAM or above
NVIDIA® GeForce® series 8 and 8M, Intel® HD Graphics 2000, Quadro FX 4800, Quadro FX 5600, AMD Radeon™ R600, Mobility Radeon™ HD 4330, Mobility FirePro™ series, Radeon™ R5 M230 or higher graphics card with up-to-date drivers
1280 × 768 screen resolution, 32-bit color
1 GB of free hard disk space or above

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Image Pixelator free?

Yes. Photos are pixelated for free and without an account.

Can a pixelated face be unpixelated?

Short answer: strong pixelation is hard to reverse. Light pixelation is not. Long answer: software trained on faces can sometimes recognize or partly restore a face from small blocks or a soft blur. Privacy forums have warned about it for years. That is why the default blocks here are large. The tool also warns that light pixelation can be partly reversed by AI. If something must stay unreadable, switch to Solid.

Can I blur faces in photos on iPhone or Android without an app?

Yes, without installing a face blur app. Open this page in Safari or Chrome on your phone, tap Select photos and choose from the gallery. Frames, effects and Download work as on a PC; drag frames with your finger. For very large photos on some phones, see the limits above.

Image Pixelator: Pixelate Image Online and Blur Faces

Need to blur faces in video?

Censor photos before sharing