About the Blur Image tool
Blur an entire image for backgrounds, privacy, or dreamy effects. Adjust the radius from a soft 1px haze to a full 40px wash.
Blurring runs entirely in your browser — which matters here more than on most tools, since blurring is usually how people hide private information before sharing.
How to use it
- Add your image.
- Adjust the settings and watch the live preview.
- Download the result.
About the blur effect
This applies a softening effect across the whole image or a selected area.
Worth knowing
The most practical use is redaction — obscuring a face, a license plate, an address or a screenshot of private data before sharing.
One important caution: a light blur can sometimes be partially reversed by software, and pixelation is weaker still. For anything genuinely sensitive, use a heavy blur or cover the area with a solid block rather than a light one.
How much blur is enough for redaction
The practical test is whether any structure remains. If you can still see the outline of letters, the shape of a face or the pattern of a barcode, the blur is too light — those residual patterns are what recovery software works from.
A useful rule of thumb: the blur radius should be at least as large as the smallest feature you are trying to hide. Hiding text means the radius must exceed the height of a character, not merely soften it. For a face, the radius needs to be large enough that the eyes, nose and mouth are no longer distinguishable as separate features.
When the information is genuinely sensitive — a passport number, a bank card, a home address — the safest option is not blur at all. Draw a solid rectangle over it. A solid block contains no underlying data to recover, which is a guarantee no amount of blurring can offer.
Common mistakes
- Using a light blur on sensitive information, which can sometimes be recovered.
- Blurring the whole image when only a region needed it.
- Blurring to hide a focus miss. It makes the problem more obvious, not less.
Questions people ask
Is blurring safe for hiding personal data?
A heavy blur is reasonably safe; a light one is not. For anything serious, cover the area with a solid shape.
Can I blur just part of the image?
Yes — select the region rather than applying it to the whole frame.
Does blurring change file size?
Usually it shrinks the file, since blurred areas contain less fine detail to encode.