Pixelate a face in a photo
The mosaic look from news footage, applied to every face found in your picture.
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How it works
Add your images
Drag and drop, paste, or pick files. They upload over an encrypted connection.
Pick a quality or a target size
Use the quality slider, or tell it exactly how many KB or MB you need.
Download
Save each file, or grab them all at once as a ZIP.
Pixelation replaces a face with a grid of large, flat-coloured squares. It is the look familiar from television interviews and court reporting, and it signals clearly that something was hidden on purpose. This page opens the face tool with pixelation selected. Add a photo, and each face found is turned into a mosaic.
One slider sets the block size. At the low end a face is divided into about forty squares across and stays quite readable. At the high end only four or five squares cover it and nothing of the features remains. The grid is counted per face, so a distant face and a close one end up equally coarse.
As with any automatic detection, some faces are missed: very small ones, profiles, faces behind hands or masks. Each detected face has a box you can switch off, and you can drag a rectangle over anything else that should be pixelated. Go over the result before you publish it.
Pixelation or blur
Both hide detail, and they send different messages. A blur is soft and unobtrusive and suits a photo that should still look like an ordinary photo, such as a holiday picture with strangers in the background. Pixelation is deliberately visible. It suits screenshots, documentation and reporting, where the reader should notice that an identity was withheld.
There is also a practical difference. A mosaic keeps hard edges, so it survives being shrunk and recompressed by a social network without turning into a vague smudge. You can switch between the two effects in the panel and compare them on your own picture.
How coarse is coarse enough
A fine mosaic can be surprisingly revealing. When the squares are small, the average colour of each one still traces the eyes, the mouth and the shape of the head, and people who know the person recognise them at once, especially when the picture is viewed small or from a distance. Squint at your result: if the face comes back, raise the block size.
A good rule is that no feature should be guessable from the blocks: not the direction of the gaze, not a smile, not glasses. Six to eight blocks across a face usually achieves that.
Where the squares are drawn
The mosaic fills an oval a little larger than the detected face, so the forehead and chin are included while the shoulders and background stay sharp. An oval looks less heavy than a full rectangle and is harder to mistake for a compression fault. Everything outside it is left as it was.
File format
The picture is returned in the format you supplied. For images with large flat areas, such as screenshots, PNG keeps the block edges perfectly crisp. For photographs, JPG is smaller and the slight softening of the edges is not noticeable. The saved file contains only the pixelated version of each hidden area.
Frequently asked questions
How do I pixelate only part of a picture?
Switch off the boxes you do not need and drag a rectangle over the part you want hidden.
Can pixelation be undone?
The saved file no longer contains the original pixels. With very small blocks a face may still be recognisable, so choose a coarse setting when identity matters.
Can I pixelate text or a number plate?
Yes. Draw an area over it. Use a large block size for text: fine pixelation of letters and digits can sometimes be read back.
Does it work on screenshots?
Yes. Faces in screenshots are detected like any others, and names or messages can be covered with hand-drawn areas.
Is there a limit on image size?
The file size limit of your plan applies, and very large pictures of more than 50 megapixels are not accepted for face detection.
Is the mosaic applied in my browser?
No. The picture is processed on our servers and removed when the result has been sent back.