Redact an image

Drag a box over anything private. The pixels underneath are replaced, not covered by a layer, and the file you save is re-encoded from what you can see — so there is no original underneath and no metadata carried along. The picture never leaves this page.

Redacting a PDF instead? Use the PDF redactor: it removes the text under the boxes, which drawing a shape in a PDF editor doesn't.

Why a solid box, and not a blur

• Blur is reversible often enough to matter. It is a transformation of the original pixels, not a removal of them, and newsrooms and courts have both been embarrassed by it.
• Pixelated text can be brute-forced. There are only so many words that pixelate to a given pattern, and recovering them is a published technique, not a theory.
• A layer is not a redaction. In editors that keep layers, "flattening" sometimes keeps the original, and some formats store a preview image of the unedited picture.
• Metadata outlives the edit. A photo can carry the location, the device and a thumbnail of the original frame. Re-encoding, as this page does, drops all of it.

The better version: never create the exposure

Redacting afterwards means the unredacted image existed, at least on your disk and often in whatever tool made it. When the picture is a screenshot you are about to take, the safer order is to black the values out before the capture, so the full-resolution original is never written anywhere.