How to Blur a Face in a Photo (iPhone, Android, Windows, Online)

To blur a face in a photo, the quickest method on any device is a browser tool: open Blur Face, choose your photo, and the faces are found and blurred automatically. You can switch to pixelate or a solid black box, skip a face by clicking its box, draw over any face that was missed, and download. The photo is processed by your browser and never uploaded.

Built-in options exist too, but they differ a lot by device: recent iPhones can pixelate a face with Clean Up, Google Photos on Android has been adding a redaction pen, Samsung’s Gallery has a mosaic pen, and Windows has no real face blur at all. Whatever you use, make the effect strong. A light blur can sometimes be reversed or recognized, as research cited below shows.

The quick answer: blur faces in your browser

A web tool works the same on iPhone, Android, Windows, Mac and Chromebook, and it finds the faces for you:

1. Open Blur Face in Safari, Chrome, Edge or Firefox.
2. Choose, drop or paste a photo. A face detection model runs on your device (WebAssembly) and draws a box around each face it finds.
3. Pick the Effect: Blur, Pixelate or Solid black. Adjust Strength (default 85%) and the Shape (ellipse or rectangle).
4. Click a box to leave that face visible, or drag on the photo to cover a face the detector missed.
5. Tap Download. The result is saved as JPG, PNG or WebP, in the same format as your photo when the browser can write it.

A few details make it more reliable than a manual blur. Each detected box is enlarged by 20% so hair, ears and chin are covered, not just the eyes and nose. The strength is relative to each face’s size, so a small face at the back of a group photo is hidden as thoroughly as a close-up. At the default strength, pixelate turns each face into roughly seven blocks across; at 100%, about four.

If you want to hide something that is not a face, such as a license plate, a name badge or a screen, use Pixelate Image or Blur Image and drag a box over it. Both let you choose the exact pixel size or blur radius.

On iPhone: Clean Up in Photos, or a browser

The Photos app’s Markup tool has no blur or pixelate brush. What iPhone does have, on models that support Apple Intelligence, is Clean Up: Apple’s Photos user guide states that “if you brush over a person’s face, the face may become blurred with a pixelated effect.” The iPhone version of Clean Up behaves the same way:

1. Open the photo in Photos and tap Edit.
2. Tap Clean Up (the first use may download the feature).
3. Brush over or circle the face. It should be replaced by a pixelated patch rather than erased.
4. Tap Done. Photos keeps the original, so you can revert later.

Note the word “may”: Clean Up decides for itself whether to pixelate or remove, the pixel size is not adjustable, and the feature is only available on iPhones, languages and regions that support Apple Intelligence. On older iPhones, use Blur Face in Safari, or cover the face with an opaque Markup shape and check the result zoomed in for gaps.

On Android: Google Photos and Samsung Gallery

Google Photos. In late 2026 Google started rolling out a Redact pen in the editor’s Markup section on Android, with Mosaic, Mosaic Light and Blur styles and an adjustable brush, as reported by Android Authority. If your app has it: open the photo, tap Edit, then Markup, pick the Redact pen, paint over the face, and save a copy. Google has not published a help page for it at the time of writing, so menu names may vary.

Samsung Gallery. The Gallery editor includes a Mosaic pen among its drawing tools (inside Decorations or the pen menu, depending on the One UI version). Paint over the face, then use Save as copy from the three-dot menu if you want to keep the original.

In both cases you paint by hand, so it is easy to miss part of a face or leave a soft edge. Choose the coarsest style available.

On Windows and Mac

Windows has no built-in face blur. The Photos app’s background blur, described in Microsoft’s Edit photos and videos in Windows help page, does the opposite of what you want: it keeps the person sharp and blurs what is behind them. The most robust built-in option is Paint: choose the rectangle or ellipse shape, set the fill to solid, and draw it over the face. A solid shape is not elegant, but it hides the face completely.

On a Mac, Photos has the same Clean Up tool as the iPhone on Apple Intelligence Macs. Preview has no blur, but its Markup toolbar can draw a filled shape over a face before you export.

Which method should you pick?

Method	Devices	Finds faces	Effects	Control over strength
Blur Face	Any browser	Yes, automatically	Blur, pixelate, solid black	10–100%, relative to each face
iPhone Clean Up	Apple Intelligence iPhones	You brush each face	Pixelate	None
Google Photos Redact	Android (rolling out)	You paint each face	Mosaic, mosaic light, blur	Brush size only
Samsung Mosaic pen	Galaxy phones	You paint each face	Mosaic styles	Brush size
Paint / Preview shape	Windows / Mac	You draw each box	Solid shape	Not needed

For a group photo with many people, automatic detection saves the most time. For a single sensitive face, any method works as long as the result is strong or opaque.

Why a light blur is not enough

Blurring and pixelating throw away detail, so the original face cannot be rebuilt exactly. But they do not throw away everything. The rough shape of the head, the skin tone, the hairline and the position of the eyes often survive, and software is good at using such leftovers.

In the 2016 paper Defeating Image Obfuscation with Deep Learning, researchers Richard McPherson, Reza Shokri and Vitaly Shmatikov trained neural networks to recognize faces and objects that had been pixelated or blurred with YouTube’s face-blurring tool, and the networks succeeded far more often than chance, even though the faces looked unrecognizable to people. The weaker the obfuscation, the better the recognition.

Text is even more fragile. In 2022, Dan Petro of Bishop Fox described Unredacter in Never Use Text Pixelation To Redact Sensitive Information: the tool recovered pixelated text from a public challenge image by rendering candidate characters in the same font, pixelating them the same way and comparing the blocks. His recommendation is black bars covering the whole text, not pixelation or blur.

So, in practice:

• Use big blocks or a heavy blur. A face reduced to a few blocks across leaves little to work with. A gentle blur that softens the features does not hide them.
• Use a solid box for anything sensitive. Black fill leaves no information at all. In Blur Face, choose Solid black; the option is labeled “cannot be undone” because nothing of the face remains in the download.
• Cover the whole head. Hair, ears and the outline of the face help identification. That is why Blur Face enlarges each detected box.
• Never share the original. Send the downloaded copy, not the photo from your gallery, and don’t post both versions.

Other details that can identify someone

Hiding a face does not make a person anonymous. Before sharing, look for:

• Name tags, uniforms, tattoos and distinctive clothing. Cover them with Pixelate Image or a solid box.
• License plates, house numbers and street signs, which reveal where the photo was taken.
• Screens and documents in the background. Use a solid box for text, for the reasons above.
• Hidden metadata. Photos from a phone often store GPS coordinates, the date and the camera model. Blur Face’s download is re-encoded, which does not copy that EXIF data, but other editors may keep it. Our guide on how to remove EXIF data from photos explains how to check and clean it, or you can use Remove EXIF Data directly.

Blurring a face takes less than a minute either way. Taking a few seconds more to check these details is what actually keeps someone private.