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Redact image regions

Draw over sensitive areas to pixelate or black them out before sharing. No file leaves your device.

How Redact image regions works

Image Redact lets you draw rectangles over sensitive areas of a photo and choose either destructive pixelation or a solid black box for each region. Once you apply the redaction, the affected pixels are permanently replaced in a new Canvas layer and the output is exported as a flat file. Because the result is a standard JPEG or PNG with the obscured regions merged into the pixel grid, there is no hidden layer to recover.

This matters for sharing screenshots that contain personal data, internal URLs, private messages, passport details or any information you do not want to disclose. The image never leaves your browser: the file is read locally, the Canvas operations run in JavaScript, and only the redacted output is saved to your disk. Apply the redaction before sharing, not after, since any recipient of the original file could ignore your intent.

Written by Bastien Sulyan

How to use Redact image regions, step by step

  1. Drop your image onto the upload area or click to open the file picker.
  2. Click and drag on the image to draw a redaction rectangle over the area you want to hide.
  3. Choose Pixelate or Black box for the redaction style.
  4. Add more rectangles as needed to cover all sensitive regions.
  5. Click Apply Redactions to flatten the result, then Download to save the file.

Common use cases

  • A support engineer pastes a screenshot of a customer's dashboard into the tool to redact the customer's email address before sharing in a team chat.
  • A journalist obscures a source's face and identifying details in a photograph before publication.
  • A developer redacts an API key visible in an error screenshot before posting to a public bug tracker.
  • An HR administrator covers personal ID numbers and dates of birth on a scanned form before forwarding to an external party.

Frequently asked questions

Can the pixelated or blacked-out area be recovered?

No. Pixelation is applied by reading the pixel values within the rectangle, averaging them into a small grid of solid-colour blocks, and drawing that grid back onto the Canvas with hard, nearest-neighbour edges instead of a smooth gradient. The black-box option replaces the rectangle with a solid fill instead. Both operations discard the original pixel values directly; when the image is exported, those original pixels are gone. There is no separate layer, no steganographic encoding and no reversible transform.

Is the original image preserved anywhere after I apply a redaction?

The original image data is held in browser memory during your session. When you click Apply Redactions, a new Canvas is rendered with the changes. The page does not save the original file to localStorage or any server. If you close the tab, the original is no longer accessible through this tool.

Does the pixelation strength affect how effectively the content is hidden?

Not for reversibility: even at the lowest strength, every cell is replaced by the true average of its source pixels, and the block size never drops below a minimum that keeps the mosaic solid, so the original detail is discarded either way. What the strength setting changes is how coarse the visible blocks look: a higher strength produces fewer, larger blocks, which makes the outline of the hidden content harder to guess. For content where even that outline matters, such as private keys or security codes, the black-box option is the more conclusive choice, since it replaces the region with a single flat colour rather than an averaged mosaic.

Will the exported file contain any metadata about what was redacted?

No. The output is a plain image file. No EXIF, XMP or custom metadata records the position of redacted areas. The file looks the same as any other image of the same type.

Can I use this tool to redact text in a PDF?

This tool works on raster image files (JPEG, PNG). For PDFs, use the dedicated PDF annotation remover or a PDF-specific redaction workflow. Screenshotting a PDF page and redacting the raster image is a valid workaround when a PDF editor is not available.

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