How to redact a screenshot or photo
Screenshots leak more than people expect: browser tabs, notification previews, email addresses in a sidebar, the last digits of a card. Photos add faces, house numbers and GPS coordinates. The image redaction tool deals with all of it.
Steps
- Paste or upload. Copy the screenshot and press Ctrl+V (Cmd+V on a Mac) on the page, or choose a PNG, JPG, WebP or HEIC file.
- Let OCR read it. Text in the picture is read in your browser and then checked by AI once you agree.
- Turn on picture redaction if needed. Under "In pictures", pick faces, screens, road signs or number plates.
- Fix the boxes. Untick anything to keep, and drag on the image to cover avatars, QR codes or anything else.
- Download. HEIC photos come back as JPG.
Boxes, not blur
Blur and pixelation keep a trace of the original. For short values like phone numbers or PINs, that trace can be enough to guess the text. A solid box replaces the pixels, so there is nothing to work back from.
Metadata
Photos carry EXIF data: where and when they were taken, the camera or phone model and sometimes its serial number. The editor lists what it found, and the download is re-encoded without any of it. More in removing location and camera data from photos.
Easy to miss
- Reflections in windows, glasses and screens.
- Name badges, parcel labels and post on a desk.
- URLs with session tokens or account IDs in the address bar.
- Profile pictures and user names in chat screenshots.