Pixelate Image
Apply a mosaic pixelation effect to an entire image or pick specific areas to censor. All processing in your browser.
Drag an image here, or click to browse
JPG, PNG, WebP supported
How to pixelate an image
Drop, set the size, select regions if needed, download.
Drop your image
Drag any JPG, PNG or WebP onto the tool.
Choose a mode
Full image applies the mosaic effect to everything. Region mode lets you click and drag to select specific areas.
Set the pixel size
Bigger pixels mean more pixelation. 8 to 16 is usually enough for censoring. 32 to 64 creates that blocky retro look.
Download
Download as PNG. Selection rectangles are removed from the final output.
Why pixelation is better than blur for censoring
Blur can sometimes be reversed with sharpening algorithms, especially light blurs. Pixelation permanently replaces the original pixel values with averaged blocks. There is no unblur filter that can reconstruct a pixelated face. It also looks intentional. Viewers immediately understand that pixelated areas are censored on purpose.
For personal use like hiding names in screenshots or addresses in documents, pixelation at 12px or higher is plenty. For legal or journalistic use, always check with your compliance team, but pixelation is the standard approach for protecting identity in published images.
Pixelation is weaker than people think
This matters, so it is worth stating plainly. Pixelating text is not a safe way to hide it. Researchers have demonstrated practical recovery of pixelated text, and the reason is straightforward once you see it.
Pixelation replaces each block with the average colour of the pixels inside it. That average is a real measurement of what was there. When the hidden content comes from a small, predictable set, such as digits, or words in a known font on a known background, an attacker can render every candidate, pixelate each one the same way, and compare the averages until they match. The search space for a six digit number is small enough to exhaust in moments.
Photographs are much safer, because a face has effectively unlimited possible arrangements of pixels and there is no candidate list to test against. The risk is specific to low entropy content, and low entropy content is exactly what people most often try to hide.
For anything that must stay secret, such as account numbers, addresses, card details, email addresses or names, do not pixelate. Cover it with a solid opaque block. A solid fill discards the information completely rather than averaging it, and nothing can be recovered from it. The blur and censor tool has a Solid block mode for exactly this.
When pixelation is the right tool
Pixelation still has honest uses, and they are the ones where the goal is discretion rather than secrecy.
Choosing a block size
The block size decides how much information survives. Larger blocks average more pixels together and discard more. A common mistake is choosing a block size that looks heavily obscured on a small preview, then discovering that the full resolution image still shows the shape of the letters clearly.
Judge the strength at full size, not in a thumbnail. As a rough guide, if the feature you are hiding is still recognisable in outline, the blocks are too small. For a face, the whole head should be reduced to a handful of blocks rather than dozens.
Pixelation and blur are not interchangeable
Blur spreads each pixel into its neighbours across a smooth radius. Pixelation snaps whole regions to one flat value. Blur usually looks more natural in a photograph, which is why film and television use it for faces and brands.
Neither is secure for text. A light blur is reversible in principle by the same logic as pixelation, and in practice mild blurs on known content have been undone. Both are visual treatments. Only a solid fill is a removal.