How to Pixelate a Face in a Photo

You might be posting a photo of a crowd, sharing a screenshot of a group chat, publishing a street photograph, or sending a document to support. In every case the goal is the same: keep the picture useful, but stop a specific person from being identifiable.

Pixelation is the usual answer because it is destructive. Unlike drawing a shape over a face in a layered editor, a correctly applied pixelation replaces the underlying detail with flat blocks of averaged color. Done at a sensible block size, the facial features simply are not in the exported file anymore.

The fastest method: a browser tool

If you just want it done, an online pixelator is the shortest path because there is nothing to install and no account to create. The important question to ask about any of them is whether your photo gets uploaded to a server.

Our pixelate image tool does the work in your browser using the HTML canvas API, so the photo never leaves your device. The steps:

• Drag the photo onto the drop area, or click to browse for it.
• Turn on Pixelate Area Only. A selection box appears in the middle of the image.
• Drag the box over the face and use the handles on its edges and corners to size it. Draw additional boxes if there is more than one face.
• Raise the Pixel Size slider until the features are gone. See the block size section below for what "gone" actually means.
• Pick PNG and download.

On iPhone and iPad

If you have Apple Intelligence, the Photos app can do this without installing anything. Open the photo, tap Edit, choose Clean Up, and scribble over the face with your finger or an Apple Pencil. It pixelates the area and displays "Identity protection applied". Everything runs on-device.

The catch is the hardware requirement. Clean Up needs iOS 18.1 or later and an iPhone 15 Pro, any iPhone 16, or an iPad or Mac with an M1 or A17 Pro chip onwards. On anything older the option will not appear.

The other limitation is that you do not set the strength. Clean Up decides how heavily to pixelate, which is fine for casual use but gives you nothing to adjust if the result is still recognizable. A tool with a block size slider lets you push it further and check the outcome yourself.

The Markup tool is the blunt alternative: open the photo, tap Edit, then the Markup icon, and draw a filled shape over the face. That is masking rather than pixelation, so nothing survives underneath it, and it works on any device.

In Photoshop

Photoshop's equivalent is the Mosaic filter. Select the face with the Lasso or Marquee tool, then choose Filter → Pixelate → Mosaic and raise the Cell Size until the features break down.

One caution that matters more than the technique: flatten the image before you export, and export to a new file. A layered PSD, or a format that preserves layers, can contain the untouched original underneath the filtered layer. People have leaked the exact thing they were trying to hide by sending the working file instead of a flattened export.

Choosing a block size that actually works

This is the step people get wrong. A block size that merely makes a face look blocky is not the same as one that makes it unidentifiable. If the face still reads as a face, with a recognizable head shape, hair color, skin tone and the suggestion of eyes, it can often still be matched against a known person, particularly when the viewer already has a short list of candidates.

A useful rule of thumb is to work relative to the face rather than to the image. Aim for roughly five to eight blocks across the width of the face, not across the width of the photo. On a face occupying 200 pixels in a large image, that means a block size somewhere around 25 to 40 pixels. On a small face in a group shot, a much lower number gets you to the same place.

Zoom out and squint at the result. If you can still tell who it is, the blocks are too small. Our pixel block size guide breaks this down further.

What pixelation does not protect

Pixelating the face is one part of the job. Two things routinely undo it:

The original file

Editing a photo does not retract the copies of it that already exist. If the unedited version was already posted, backed up to a shared album, or sent to someone, pixelating a later copy does nothing about it.

Embedded metadata

Photos from phones and cameras carry EXIF metadata, which frequently includes GPS coordinates, the date and time, and the device. A pixelated face with intact GPS data can still place a person at an address on a specific afternoon.

Any tool that rebuilds the image from raw canvas pixels, ours included, produces a fresh file without the original EXIF block, because the export is generated from pixel data rather than copied from the source file. If you use a different tool, check its output before assuming the same.

When pixelation is the wrong choice

Pixelation is strong for faces and weak for text. A face is a continuous, high-variation subject, whereas text drawn from a known alphabet in a known font is a small set of possibilities that can be tested one by one against the blocks. If what you are hiding is a phone number, an account number, an email address or a plate, use a solid shape instead.

We cover the reasoning behind that in can a pixelated image be reversed.