Redact Image Online
Redact image online for free, with no signup. Drop your document, scan or screenshot and the solid black rectangle is already armed, so your first drag is a real redaction rather than a soft blur you have to reconsider. The export is flattened, which means the covered pixels are replaced rather than hidden behind a layer that travels with the file. Nothing is uploaded. PNG, JPG or WebP up to 25 MB.
Drop the document you need to redact
Opens on a solid black rectangle, and the export is flattened, so nothing survives underneath it. Or press Ctrl + V to paste one straight from your clipboard. PNG, JPG or WebP, up to 25 MB. Edited in your browser, never uploaded.
Every Leaked Redaction
Is the Same Mistake
A black rectangle drawn over text in a PDF does not delete the text. The rectangle is one layer, the text is another, and the file cheerfully carries both. That single fact is behind almost every redaction failure that has ever made the news.
Same editor, different job
Each opens with the redaction tool set up the way that page argues for.
Tools that pair well with this one
All free, all in your browser, no signup.
How to redact an image
Three steps, no account, 25 MB per image.
Drop or paste the document
A photo of a page, a scan, a screenshot, or an export from a PDF as PNG or JPG. Nothing uploads.
Black out every field that has to go
The solid rectangle is already armed. Cover each field generously, a little past the text on every side, and work through the page in order so you do not skip one.
Export flattened, then check it
Download at full resolution. Open the file you got, try to select the covered text, and confirm there is nothing there. It takes five seconds and it is the whole point.
The mistake
Why redaction fails in PDFs and layered files
If you take one thing from this page, take this one. It is the reason redacted documents leak, and it has almost nothing to do with how good the black rectangle looked.
A PDF is not a picture. It is a description of a page: text objects with their positions and fonts, images, vector shapes, and annotations layered on top. When you draw a black rectangle over a paragraph in a PDF viewer, you have added a shape to the description. The text objects underneath are untouched and still in the file, with their exact characters and positions intact.
Anyone can get them back, and not by hacking anything. Select the region and copy. Extract the text with any command-line tool. Open the file in an editor and delete the annotation layer. Convert the PDF to plain text. Every one of those takes seconds and requires no skill, which is why this failure keeps happening to organisations with lawyers and review processes.
The same trap exists in layered image formats and in office documents. Covering something in a layered editor and saving in a format that keeps layers preserves the original underneath. Cropping a screenshot in some editors historically kept the cropped pixels in the file. The pattern is always the same: the format was designed to remember, and hiding is not deleting.
A flattened raster export does not have that problem, and that is the entire technical argument for doing it this way. Compositing the black rectangle into the pixels means the covered area *is* black in the file. There are no layers, no text objects and no annotation to peel off, because the file format has nowhere to keep them.
The rest of the cluster
What to cover
Redacting a document you have been asked to send
Most redaction is not a legal exercise. It is somebody being asked for proof of something and not wanting to hand over everything else on the page.
The rule that makes this easy: cover everything that is not the thing you were asked to prove. Verification requests are almost always about one fact, and the document happens to also carry ten others.
- A bank statement for proof of address: They asked for your name and address. Black out every transaction line, the balance, the account number and the sort code. What is left is the letterhead and two lines, and that is the correct amount of information to send.
- A card for payment verification: Usually the name and the last four digits, and nothing else. Cover the rest of the number, the expiry, the CVV on the back and the signature strip. There is a whole guide on this one because the request is worded confusingly.
- An ID or passport: Cover the document number, the machine-readable zone at the bottom, the date of birth if it was not asked for, and the signature. The MRZ is the one people forget and it encodes most of the rest of the page.
- An invoice or a contract: Third-party names, rates, other line items and anything covered by a confidentiality clause with a different counterparty. The most common leak here is somebody else's details on the page you were forwarding.
- A screenshot of a system: Internal IDs, ticket numbers, other customers in the list view, and the sidebar you cropped around but did not actually crop.
Work in reading order rather than jumping around, and check the edges of the page last. The margin, the footer, the header and the page number are where the thing you missed usually is, because your eye has been on the middle of the document the entire time.
Conventions
Redaction conventions that make a document readable afterwards
A redacted document still has to be usable by whoever receives it. There are conventions for that, and they are older than any software involved.
- Keep the shape of what you removed: A black bar the width of the original text tells the reader something was there and roughly how much. Blacking out a whole paragraph to hide one name makes the document harder to read and tells the reader less.
- Be consistent about what you hide: If you cover one person's name, cover it everywhere it appears, including in the header, the signature block and the file name. A name that survives in one place identifies every bar with the same width on the rest of the page.
- Do not leave a length clue on anything short: A bar sized exactly to a four-character word narrows the guess considerably. For short fields, either cover a generous fixed width or cover the surrounding label as well.
- Black on white, and only black: A redaction is not a highlight. Grey, coloured or semi-transparent bars read as annotation rather than removal, and semi-transparent ones sometimes actually are.
The fill here comes from the shared palette, so a white bar on a dark screenshot or a grey placeholder is available if the document calls for it. Black is the default because on a page of black text on white paper it is the one that reads unambiguously as removed.
Honest scope
What this redaction tool does, and what it is not
Worth reading before you rely on it for something that matters, which is the only reason anyone is on this page.
- It takes images, not PDFs: PNG, JPG and WebP. If your document is a PDF, export or screenshot the pages as images first. That is an extra step, and it is also the step that removes the layer problem described above, so it is not purely a cost.
- It does not find the sensitive fields: No OCR and no automatic detection. You drag over each field yourself, which is slower and is also the reason nothing gets missed by a model that has never seen your document format.
- It is not a compliance certification: What we can tell you is technical: the covered pixels are replaced and the export is flattened, so the output file does not contain what you covered. Whether that satisfies a particular regulation, court, or client contract is a question for the people who own that requirement, and no browser tool can answer it for you.
- It does not redact video: Video needs a server, and the argument on this page is that nothing goes to one.
What it does do: rectangles, ellipses and traced regions filled solid in any palette colour, as many per image as the document needs, full undo while you work, and a flattened full-resolution export in PNG, JPG or WebP with the original metadata stripped. Check the result before you send it. That advice is free and it is the only step nobody can do for you.
A redaction, not a rectangle on top of one.
The difference is whether the file you send still contains what you covered.
Solid black, already armed
No choosing a method first. The style with nothing left underneath it is the one in your hand when the editor opens, because on this page it is the only one that answers the question.
The export is flattened
Regions are composited into the pixels on the way out. There is no annotation layer in the file you download, so there is nothing for a viewer, a converter or a text extractor to peel back off.
As many redactions as the page needs
Every rectangle is its own layer while you work, so you can move one, resize it or delete it without disturbing the others. A form with eleven fields to black out is eleven drags.
Ovals and traced outlines too
A rectangle for a field or a line, an ellipse for a stamp or a photo on an ID, and freehand for a signature, which is the one thing on a document that never fits a box.
Nothing is uploaded
Your browser opens the file and does the work locally. The document you decided was too sensitive to send unredacted does not have to be sent to us first to become redactable.
No metadata in the file you send
The export is re-encoded from raw pixels, so the timestamp, device and any GPS coordinates in the original are gone. A redacted scan that still says which phone photographed it and where is only half redacted.
Frequently asked questions
Whether a black box removes anything, how this differs from blurring, and where it stops.
It depends entirely on the file format, which is the single most important thing on this page. In a PDF or any layered format, no: the rectangle is one object and the text is another, and both travel in the file. Anybody can select, copy or extract the text underneath.
In a flattened image, yes. The export here composites the rectangle into the pixels, so the covered area is genuinely black in the file you download. There is no layer to remove because the format has nowhere to keep one.
A blur transforms the pixels; a redaction replaces them. That means a blur always leaves some encoded trace of the original, and how recoverable it is depends on the strength and on what was underneath. A solid fill leaves nothing, because it never looked at the pixels underneath in the first place. For a document, that difference is the whole job, which is why this page arms the fill and not the blur.
Yes, and a scan is the easiest case, because it is already a flat picture with no text layer to worry about. Drop the scan, black out each field, and export. If you scanned to PDF rather than to an image, export the pages as PNG first, which also gets you out of the layered-file problem in one step.
We can tell you the technical fact and not the legal one. Technically, the covered pixels are replaced and the export is flattened, so the file you download does not contain what you covered, which is the requirement most redaction rules are trying to express. Whether that satisfies your regulator, your court, your client or your own policy is a judgement for whoever owns that requirement. We are not making a certification and you should be suspicious of any free browser tool that does.
Yes, and the tool stays armed between them, so a form with a dozen fields is a dozen drags rather than a dozen trips back to the toolbar. Each one is its own layer while you work, listed in the layers panel, which is the fastest way to confirm your count before you export.
No. Beyond flattening the redactions, the export is re-encoded from raw pixels, so the EXIF block from the original, including the timestamp, the device model and any GPS coordinates, does not carry through. That matters for a photographed document, which otherwise arrives saying exactly when and where it was photographed.
Yes. The fill comes from the same palette as the rest of the editor, so white on a dark screenshot or grey as a visible placeholder are both available. Black is the default because on a printed page it is the one convention nobody misreads as a highlight or an annotation.
Free, unlimited, no account and no watermark, and nothing is uploaded. Your browser opens the file and does the redaction locally, so the document you were careful enough to redact is not sent to a third party in order to redact it. That is the part worth checking on any tool you use for this, including this one.
Black it out, then check the file
Drop your document, cover every field that should not travel, and export flattened. Nothing gets uploaded, and nothing survives under the bars.