Turn a photo into flat colour blocks to hide a face, a licence plate or a line of text, or to make retro pixel art. Pick the block size, download, nothing is uploaded.
Splits the picture into a grid of squares and paints each square one colour, either the average of the pixels inside it or the single pixel at its centre. The image keeps its exact dimensions, so a 1920 × 1080 photo with 12 px blocks becomes 160 × 90 flat cells drawn at full size. Because every block is a real average, the overall colours and brightness of the picture survive, only the detail goes.
A 4032 × 3024 phone photo where a face fills roughly 500 × 600 pixels: at 8 px blocks the face is still recognisable, at 24 px it is a dozen flat patches and identity is gone, at 40 px even the outline of the head merges into the background. For a screenshot with a 14 px line of text, 6 px blocks make it unreadable while the layout of the page stays obvious. For pixel art, resize a photo to 128 px wide first with Resize Image, then pixelate at 1 to 2 px and scale it back up with Pixel art resampling.
Use it when you need to hide something and want it to be obvious that it was hidden: faces of bystanders, number plates, an address on a form, a child in a class photo. Pixelation is a stronger choice than a light blur for anonymising, because there is no detail left to sharpen back. If only one region should be hidden and the rest kept intact, Censor Photo lets you draw the area; this tool pixelates the whole picture. For a soft, pleasant look rather than a censored one, use Blur Image instead.
Block size is the width of each square in original pixels, 2 to 60. The badge shows how many blocks the image ends up with. Average colour keeps the photo smooth and true to its tones; Single pixel copies the centre pixel of every block, which looks harsher and more like an old video game. Output Same keeps the original file type; PNG gives the cleanest block edges since JPEG compression softens them slightly.
Can pixelation be reversed? Not from the output. Each block stores one colour, so the detail inside it is gone. Very small blocks (2 to 4 px) on a large face can still be recognisable by eye, so use 20 px or more when privacy matters.
Why do the blocks at the right and bottom edges look thinner? The image width is rarely an exact multiple of the block size, so the last column and row are cut to whatever remains. It is expected and invisible at normal sizes.
Can I pixelate only one part of the photo? Not here; this tool treats the whole image. Censor Photo lets you draw a rectangle and pixelate or blur just that region.
Does it work on transparent PNGs? Yes. Transparency is averaged along with the colour, so the edges of a cut-out become stepped blocks. Download as PNG or WebP to keep the transparency.