Free photo tools/Cover or pixelate part of a photo

How to blur a license plate in a photo

Draw a box over the plate and save a copy of the photo. Use a solid box and not a real blur: a blurred plate is still a short row of large characters, and research shows that blurred text can be recovered. A solid box replaces the pixels of the plate for good.

By Paul Bădărău, maker of Milkglass. Written on 7 October 2026.

The steps

1. Open the photo redactor in your browser. It works on a phone and on a computer.
2. Choose the photo of the car.
3. Drag a box over the plate. Keep Solid cover selected.
4. Resize the box by a corner until the whole plate is under it, with a small margin on each side.
5. Add a box for each further plate in the picture.
6. Select Save the covered photo and download the copy.

The saved copy has the full size of your photo. A JPEG is saved as a JPEG at a quality of 95 of 100.

Why a solid box and not a blur

People say "blur the plate", and a blur looks softer. For a plate it is the wrong tool. Blur and pixelation compute the new pixels from the old ones, and the result still depends on the characters. A plate has few characters, they are large, and the plates of one country usually share a font and a format.

Researchers recovered blurred and mosaiced text from pictures in a 2016 study and concluded that the two transforms "are not viable approaches for text redaction" (Hill and others, Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies). A solid box has no such weakness: the tool paints every pixel in it black, whatever was under it. The guide Is pixelation safe for hiding text? explains the method.

A plate at an angle

The boxes of the tool are upright rectangles. When the car stands at an angle, the plate is a slanted shape in the picture. Draw the box around the whole slanted plate, so that all four corners of the plate are inside. The box then also covers a bit of the bumper, which costs nothing.

Find every copy of the plate

A car is a shiny object among other shiny objects. Before you save, look for the plate in these places:

• The other end of the car. Some pictures of a set show the front plate, and some the rear one.
• Reflections. A shop window, a wet road, the paint of the car next to it.
• The other photos of the set. A listing has ten pictures. One uncovered plate in picture seven is enough.
• The interior. A parking permit or a service sticker on the windshield, papers on the seat, the screen of the navigation system with a home address.
• Other cars. The plates of the neighbors' cars in the same street.

What else the photo tells

The plate is one of three things that can link a car photo to you.

• The location in the file. A photo taken in front of your house can carry the position of your house. The saved copy of the redactor carries no location, no date, and no camera data: the tool makes a new file and checks it. So the covered copy is also clean.
• The background. A house number, a street sign, or your front door. Add a box for each, or take the pictures in a neutral place.
• The name of the file. Rename the copy if the name says more than the picture.

If you have photos of the car that need no box and should lose only their location, use Remove the location from a photo. It leaves the picture untouched.

On an iPhone

Open the redactor in Safari, tap Choose a photo, and pick the photo from the Photos library or from Files. Drag with a finger to draw the box, drag the box to move it, and drag a corner to resize it. Safari saves the covered copy to the Downloads folder in the Files app. A photo in the iPhone's HEIC format opens in Safari and is saved as a JPEG.

Several photos

The tool takes one photo at a time, and each photo needs its own box, because the plate sits in a different place in each. Do the set in one go, and upload only files whose names end in -redacted. That way no uncovered original slips into the listing.