Pixelate an image

Cover a number plate, an address or a screen with solid blocks, or pixelate the whole frame for a retro look, without uploading the photo anywhere.

Drop your files here

.jpg, .jpeg, .png, .webp · up to 50 MB

Choose files

How to Pixelate Image

1
Add your image
JPG, PNG or WebP, up to 50 files at once. The format is read from the file itself, so a photo saved with the wrong extension still lands in the right decoder.
2
Set the area and the block size
Pixelate the whole frame, or give the position and size of a rectangle or ellipse in percent. Bigger blocks hide more; 16 pixels is a sensible starting point.
3
Click Pixelate and download
The picture comes back the same size in the same format, with the EXIF block, including any GPS coordinates, dropped.

Why the blocks are averaged, not sampled

The quickest way to pixelate an image in a browser is to scale it down and back up with smoothing turned off. That is nearest-neighbour resampling: every block takes the colour of one arbitrary pixel inside it, usually its top-left corner. On a flat graphic nobody notices. On a photograph it looks dirty: a face pixelated that way keeps stray highlights and dark speckles that were never representative of the area, and fine text sometimes survives as readable fragments. This tool sums the red, green, blue and alpha values of every pixel inside a block and fills the block with the true average instead. It costs one extra pass over the image, it is imperceptibly slower, and the result is the even, deliberate mosaic people expect.

Three block shapes and an edge-aware mode

Squares are the default and the safest choice for hiding information. Circles fill each block with a disc and hand the space between discs to the nearest neighbouring block, which gives a softer, dot-screen look suited to portraits. Triangle mosaic splits every block along its diagonal and averages the two halves separately, so diagonal lines in the picture survive as diagonals rather than turning into a staircase. Turn on "keep edges sharper" and the tool measures the Sobel gradient of each block: blocks sitting on a contour are split into four half-size blocks, so outlines stay legible while flat areas stay coarse. That combination reads as a stylised picture rather than a wall of squares, which matters when the point is a retro effect and not concealment.

Hiding information properly

Pixelation is reversible in principle: if an attacker can guess the original content (a fixed-format number plate, a known font, a limited character set), a brute-force search can sometimes recover it from the block averages. The defence is block size. Use blocks large enough that several characters fall inside one block, not one character per block. For text on a phone screenshot that usually means 24 pixels or more; for a car number plate photographed from a few metres away, 20 pixels is normally enough. If the material is genuinely sensitive, crop it out or paint over it instead of blurring or pixelating.

The photo never leaves your device

Decoding, averaging and re-encoding all happen inside this browser tab. Nothing is uploaded, there is no server queue, and closing the tab clears the image from memory. The EXIF block is deliberately not copied into the result: a photo you pixelated to hide an address would otherwise still carry the GPS coordinates of where it was taken.

Frequently asked questions

Does my photo get uploaded to a server?

No. The file is read, decoded, pixelated and encoded again entirely in your browser using WebAssembly codecs. There is no upload step and no copy is kept anywhere once you close the tab.

Can pixelation be undone?

Not by this tool. The averaged blocks genuinely replace the original pixels and the original values are gone. In theory, someone who knows what the hidden content looked like can narrow down the possibilities from the block averages, which is why block size matters. Choose blocks large enough that a single block covers more than one character.

What is the difference between pixelating and blurring?

Blurring spreads each pixel into its neighbours and leaves a smooth, recoverable-looking smear; pixelation replaces whole square regions with a single flat colour. Pixelation destroys more information for the same visual area and reads unambiguously as "this was hidden on purpose", which is usually what you want on a screenshot or a document photo.

What block size is safe for hiding text?

As a rule of thumb, make a block wide enough to cover at least two characters. On a full-resolution phone screenshot that is around 24 to 32 pixels; on a small crop it may be 12. If you can still make out the shape of individual letters in the result, the blocks are too small.

Can I pixelate only part of the picture?

Yes. Switch "What to pixelate" to a selected area and give the position and size as percentages of the frame, with a rectangle or an ellipse shape. Everything outside the area is copied through untouched, pixel for pixel. Percentages rather than pixel coordinates mean the same settings still make sense when you send a different photo through the same pipeline.

Are GPS coordinates removed?

Yes. The result is written without the EXIF block, so camera make, model, timestamp and any embedded location are gone. If you also want to clean up other files, Remove Image Metadata does the same job without touching the pixels.

How many files can I do at once?

Up to 50 files, 300 MB in total. The same block size, shape and area apply to every file, and several results come back as a single ZIP named pulsarkit-pixelated.zip.

Does this work on a phone?

Yes. Everything runs in the browser on iOS and Android as well as on desktop. A 3000 by 2000 photo takes well under a second; very large images take proportionally longer.