Three ways to blur an image
The whole picture. When you open an image, all of it is blurred right away. That is useful for a soft background for text, a wallpaper, a placeholder, or to hide everything in a screenshot except its layout.
Only some areas. Drag on the preview to draw an area, and from then on only the areas you drew are blurred. Use it for a face, a name, a house number, a document on a desk or the screen behind someone. Draw several areas if needed; each one has a ✕ button, and “Clear drawn areas” removes them all.
Everything except some areas. Set “Blur” to “Everything except drawn areas” and the effect is inverted: what you drew stays sharp and the rest is blurred. That gives a quick blurred-background look, like a phone’s portrait mode, around a person or a product.
Areas can be rectangles or ellipses, and you can draw them with a mouse, a pen or a finger.
Choosing the strength
The strength is a blur radius in pixels of your image, so it means the same thing on the preview and on the full-size download. The slider’s range adapts to the image, up to a twentieth of its longest side.
| You want to | Strength |
|---|---|
| Soften a photo or a background slightly | Low: a few pixels |
| Blurred-background portrait look | Medium |
| Make text or a face unreadable | High: the details should be completely gone |
The blur is a smooth, Gaussian-like blur computed in three box-blur passes. Around each area, real neighboring pixels are mixed in, so the edge of a blurred area looks natural.
A light blur can sometimes be partly reversed, and blurred text can be guessed when only a few words are possible. If the goal is privacy, go strong. For faces, Blur Face finds them automatically and can also cover them with solid black; the guide on how to blur a face in a photo compares the options. For a blocky censor effect, use Pixelate Image. For darkened edges instead of blur, try the Vignette Effect.
Formats and quality
You can open JPG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, GIF (first frame), BMP and SVG images, plus iPhone HEIC photos. The result is saved in the same format whenever the browser can write it — JPG at quality 92%, PNG or WebP (browsers that can’t save WebP, such as Safari, get PNG). HEIC and AVIF are saved as JPG; GIF, BMP and SVG as PNG. The preview may be shown smaller, but the download keeps the full resolution.
The saved file is rebuilt from pixels, so EXIF metadata such as GPS location is not copied into it.
Privacy
The image is processed on your device with the Canvas API; it is never uploaded. The tool works offline once loaded, and the site’s security policy only lets the page talk to its own server.