How to blur personal details in a screenshot
Most screenshots that leak something private leak it because the person covering it chose the wrong tool, not because they forgot.
Covering things up
Open the capture in the editor and pick a tool:
- Mosaic — drag over a region to pixelate it. Good for faces, avatars, and blocks of text you want to show the shape of without the content.
- Filled rectangle — a solid block. Ugly, and the correct choice for anything that actually matters.
- Spotlight — dims everything except the region you drew, which draws the eye to the part you are talking about instead of hiding the rest.
Everything you draw is rasterised into every exported format — PNG, PDF, ZIP and the clipboard copy alike. There is no layer left in the file for someone to peel off.
When a mosaic is not enough
This is worth saying plainly, because it applies to every screenshot tool, not just this one. Pixelation is a lossy but deterministic transformation. If an attacker knows the font, the size and the small set of possible values — a six-digit code, a phone number, a licence plate — they can render every candidate, apply the same pixelation, and compare. This has been demonstrated repeatedly on real tooling.
So: mosaic is fine for making a screenshot look tidy, and for content with a large space of possible values, like a long email body. For anything an attacker would want and could enumerate, use a solid rectangle. It removes the pixels rather than scrambling them.
Check before you send
Two mistakes are common and neither is about the blur tool:
- Something private sitting outside the region you covered — a browser tab title, an autocomplete dropdown, a notification that appeared mid-capture. On a long scrolling capture, scroll through the whole preview before exporting, not just the top.
- The original, un-edited capture still sitting in the library. Delete it if it matters.
Captured images are kept in your browser's local storage and are never uploaded — but "not uploaded" is not the same as "not on your machine".
Guides
- How to save a whole web page as an A4 PDF
- How to split a long screenshot into pages
- How to screenshot a scrolling panel inside a page
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