Edit & Effects
Pixelate & Censor
Draw rectangles over any part of your image to pixelate, mosaic, or block-censor it. Perfect for hiding faces, license plates, personal details, or any sensitive information before sharing.
Drop your image here
or click to browse — JPG, PNG, WebP supported
JPG PNG WebP
Pixel Block Size
Block Color
About This Tool
How to Pixelate or Censor an Image
- 1Drop or select your image to load it into the editor.
- 2Choose your censor style: Pixelate (classic mosaic blur), Blur (Gaussian blur), or Black Bar (solid redaction).
- 3Draw rectangles over any areas you want to censor — faces, license plates, addresses, account numbers, or any sensitive content. Add as many regions as needed.
- 4Click Download to save the redacted image. Processing is entirely local — the original and censored content never leave your device.
When to Pixelate or Censor an Image
Privacy Protection
Blur or pixelate faces in crowd photos, event images, or candid shots before publishing online or sharing with third parties — especially important when bystanders haven't given consent.
Document Redaction
Black-bar redact account numbers, Social Security numbers, addresses, and other sensitive information in screenshots of documents before sharing them for support, legal, or compliance purposes.
Screenshots & Screen Recordings
Censor private notifications, email addresses, usernames, and other personal data that appears incidentally in tutorials, bug reports, and how-to screenshots.
License Plates & Addresses
Pixelate vehicle license plates in street photography and real estate photos, and redact street addresses in location-tagged images before publishing to public platforms.
Why Censor Images in the Browser
The whole point of censoring an image is protecting sensitive information — uploading that image to a cloud service to censor it defeats the purpose. This tool applies all redaction locally in your browser using the Canvas API. The unredacted original is never transmitted anywhere. For related privacy tasks, our EXIF Viewer & Remover strips location and device metadata from photos before sharing, providing a complementary layer of privacy protection alongside visual censoring.
Frequently Asked Questions
Pixelate samples the average colour of each block and fills it as a flat square — the classic large-pixel censoring effect seen on TV.
Mosaic does the same but draws each block with a subtle border between tiles, giving it a tiled mosaic art look rather than pure pixels.
Solid Block fills the entire selected region with a single flat colour of your choice — the most complete censor, leaving no visual information at all.
Mosaic does the same but draws each block with a subtle border between tiles, giving it a tiled mosaic art look rather than pure pixels.
Solid Block fills the entire selected region with a single flat colour of your choice — the most complete censor, leaving no visual information at all.
Yes — each time you draw a selection and release, the effect is applied immediately and becomes permanent on the canvas. You can then draw another region on the updated image. Use the Undo button to step back one region at a time. There is no limit to how many regions you can censor.
For privacy purposes such as hiding a face or license plate, a block size of 16 or higher is recommended — smaller blocks can sometimes be reconstructed. For a decorative pixel art effect, smaller block sizes (4–8) create a finer mosaic pattern. The block size applies to the full-resolution image, so the effect will look proportionally smaller on large photos.
All processing happens in your browser — your image is never uploaded to any server. The Solid Block censor provides the strongest privacy guarantee since it replaces pixels with a flat colour, leaving no recoverable information. Pixelate and Mosaic effects at small block sizes could theoretically be partially reversed with sophisticated software, which is why we recommend a block size of 16+ for sensitive content.
Yes — you can switch between Pixelate, Mosaic, and Solid Block between each region you draw. For example, you could pixelate a face, then use a solid black block on a license plate, all on the same image. Each region is applied independently as you draw it.
Need to protect sensitive documents?
PaintShop Pro gives you layer-based redaction and image editing tools for permanently removing sensitive content from photos and document scans.
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