Redacted. Floating a face in a photo

Last updated on 28 July 2026

How to blur one or more faces in a photo? End of year, school trip, choir performance: you have 30 pictures to publish on the school’s website, and on almost all of them, one or two pupils whose parents have not signed the image right authorisation. Open Photoshop for that, no. In short, you need something fast, and above all, something that doesn’t send your students’ photos to a server you don’t know anything about.

Redacted has been doing this work for years and I presented it here in 2019. He's changed a lot since then. The tool now detects faces on its own, offers emojis in addition to the classic blur, and is available in a native Mac application. Everything continues to run in your browser, without account and without uploading. So I take this article from top to bottom, supplementing it with two French alternatives that teachers have been using a lot for two years.

 

Why blur students' faces before publishing

A class photo is personal data. The GDPR considers the image of an identifiable face as such, and for a minor, it is the legal representative who gives his or her consent. In practice, you have two options: collect parental permissions one by one and keep them, or blur faces and spare you the entire procedure.

The second option is often the most realistic. There are always two or three families who have not returned the paper, a student who arrived during the year, a photo taken on the spot where someone takes a back seat. Floating takes thirty seconds per image. Running after a signature takes three weeks.

A point that is often forgotten: the blurring must be irreversible. A semi-transparent black stripe or too light blur on a small face doesn't protect much. The right tools export a flattened image, without a recoverable layer, and delete EXIF metadata, which sometimes contains the school’s GPS coordinates. Redacted is a small utility that only does one thing, but does it fast and well.

What exactly is Redacted?

Redacted is an online utility that does only one thing: Hide areas on an image. No need to go out heavy artillery of editing software. You open the page, you drop your photo, you click on what should disappear, you download. There is nothing else to understand.

Two forms of selection, rectangle or oval, and four ways to hide: black block, pixelation, Gaussian blur, and recently an emoji placed on the face. The latter is frankly useful for a class blog or school account: Where the blur makes children’s photos look a bit worrying, a smiley smile is much better with families.

Automatic Face Detection

This has been the real novelty since my first article. The editor announces that the tool identifies only the faces present in the image and allows to hide them all with one click, with a model that rotates on your device. Small reserve of honesty: that detection is highlighted on the home page, whereas the ‘Features’ page of the site describes only manual selection. I have not been able to know whether it is deployed on all browsers or in the process of being generalised. In group photos, in any case, none of these tools catches all the faces: the profile heads or in the background often pass between the meshes. Always check the result before publishing.

A Mac application, free and then paid

Redacted has launched a native Mac app, available on the Mac App Store. Black block masking is free and unaccounted for. The rest, i.e. automatic AI detection, processing an entire folder in one pass, and blurring, pixelation and emoji rendering, goes through a Pro version at 9.99 $ as a one-off purchase, with a seven-day trial. No subscription, and this is to be welcomed, as there have been so many tools switching to the monthly levy in recent years.

Batch processing is the only serious argument for paying. If you return from a school trip with 80 photos to clean, emptying the file at once changes the nature of the chore. For three images before a parent meeting, the web version is more than enough.

Once you are satisfied with the result, all you have to do is retrieve the image by downloading it. Simple and fast.

Do your student photos leave your computer?

No, and that is the point that makes this Recommendable tool in school context. When you upload an image to Redacted, nothing goes to a server: the file is read and edited by your browser. The simplest proof is that the page continues to work offline once loaded. Turn off the wifi and try, it works. The site also states that detection models run locally, including in the Mac application.

Another good surprise: on export, EXIF metadata is deleted, including GPS coordinates. Many teachers are unaware that a smartphone photo taken in the courtyard takes the school’s position on board. The publisher also announces that it does not set any cookies or use any tracers.

It remains a practical limit. The interface only exists in English and Spanish, without a French version. For use by yourself, this is not inconvenient: There are four buttons. For a session with cycle 3 students, this is a real obstacle, and this is where the alternatives below take the lead.

Two French alternatives designed for schools

Since 2024, two French-language tools have prevailed in teacher practices, and they respond to a reproach that can be made to Redacted: they speak French and come from the educational ecosystem.

Face Privacy, the tool for the Forge of Educational Digital Commons

Developed by a teacher from the Grenoble academy and hosted on the Forge des communs numériqueéducation (Forge of digital educational commons), Face Privacy is free, free and entirely in French. You choose a photo, the app spots faces using an embedded neural network, displays them in thumbnails, and ticks the ones to hide. Blur or emoji, with a brush and eraser to make up for forgotten areas, and the choice of export resolution. Everything happens on your machine, as with Redacted. I dedicated to him a full article here. Detail that will please documentalist professors: the tool displays reminders about the right to the image even before opening the editor, making it a good medium for an EMI session.

Digiblur, the blurring brick of La Digitale

At The Digital, of which I speak to you regularly, Digiblur relies on the face-api.js free library to detect faces. Same principle of clickable thumbnails, two families of masks (pixelation or blur on one side, emojis on the other), and an image retrieved at the original resolution. The tool is free, funded by donations. If you are already using Digipad or Digistorm, you will be immediately familiar with the interface and it is a real time saver to stay in the same environment.

Which tool according to your need

Your need	Recommended tool	Why
Float two or three photos, right away, to any computer	Redacted (web version)	Nothing to install, no account, even works offline
Handle the 80 photos of a school trip	Redacted for Mac, Pro version	Only from the lot to offer batch processing, but 9.99 $ and Mac only
A tool in French, backed by the institution	Face Privacy	Free, hosted on the Forge of Educational Digital Commons, French interface
Hide faces with emojis for the school blog	Face Privacy or Digiblur	Warmer than blur in pictures of children
Conducting a session on the right to the image with students	Face Privacy	GDPR reminders displayed at the opening, immediate handling in French

What strikes me when I reopened this file six years later is that the need has not moved by a millimetre, while the tools have multiplied. Floating a face remains the simplest gesture to continue to show what is happening in class without exposing students. Keep one under your elbow, the one you want, and make a habit of opening it before publishing rather than after.

Link: Redacted