Redact a Screenshot
Cover names, emails and anything else in a screenshot before you share it.
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About the Redact a Screenshot converter
Screenshots get shared constantly — a bug report, a chat window, a dashboard, an error page — and they routinely contain a name, an email address, an account number or an API key that nobody meant to publish. Blacking that out should not mean opening an image editor.
Drag a box over anything you want covered and download the result. The pixels are replaced in the image itself, so there is nothing underneath to recover.
Covering something is not the same as hiding it
The famous redaction failures come from drawing a black rectangle over text that is still there underneath. In a PDF that is catastrophic, because the text sits in the file and can be selected straight through the box. Governments, law firms and newspapers have all published documents that way.
An image is safer, because there is no text layer — but only if the pixels are actually replaced. That is what happens here: the picture is redrawn with the covered areas painted over, and the original pixels are not in the file that comes out.
Solid, pixelate and blur are not equally safe
Solid fill removes the information completely. Pixelation and blur do not — they average pixels together, and averaging is partly reversible. Text pixelated over a coarse grid has been reconstructed before, and a weak blur is worse still.
Both are offered here because they often look better in a blog post or a bug report, and sometimes appearance is all you need. But the page says which is which rather than letting you assume, and warns when the one you have chosen only hides.
Metadata goes too
The redacted image is drawn fresh onto a canvas rather than edited in place, which has a useful consequence: none of the original file metadata survives. Camera model, timestamps, GPS coordinates and any generator metadata are all gone from the result.
That matters more than it sounds. A screenshot taken on a phone can carry a location, and an image someone sent you can carry the details of the machine that made it.
Frequently asked questions
Can the covered parts be recovered?
Not with the solid fill — those pixels are replaced, and the original values are not in the saved file. Pixelation and blur are different: they transform the pixels rather than discarding them, and that can be partly undone. Use solid for anything that genuinely matters.
Is my screenshot uploaded?
No. The image is read, drawn and saved by your own browser, and nothing is sent anywhere. That is the point when the thing you are covering up is exactly what you do not want to share.
Why does it always save as PNG?
Because screenshots are usually text and flat colour, which JPEG compresses badly — you would get soft edges and artefacts around the very text you are trying to keep readable. PNG is lossless, so the parts you did not cover look exactly as they did.
Can I redact a PDF this way?
Not here. A PDF keeps its text as text, so covering it visually leaves the words in the file where they can still be selected and copied. Removing text from a PDF properly is a different job from painting over an image.
Is this the same as censoring or blacking out an image?
Yes — those are the same job under different names. Solid fill is the black bar people mean by blacking out or censoring a screenshot, and it is the only one of the three options here that genuinely removes what was underneath.
Does it work on a phone?
Yes. The boxes are drawn by touch as well as by mouse, which is often where screenshots are taken in the first place.