Screenshots leak. A support thread shows a customer's full name and phone number. A bank screenshot shows a balance. A terminal window shows an API key, a status bar shows a two-factor code, a photo in the background shows a face that was never meant to be shared. One careless share and the information is out — and unlike a message, a screenshot cannot be unsent once someone has saved it. The fix takes about thirty seconds: cover the sensitive parts before the image leaves your device, and export a version in which the covered pixels are simply gone. Our free Screenshot Redactor does exactly that in your browser — paste straight from your clipboard, drag boxes over anything sensitive, pick blackout, blur or pixelate, and download a clean PNG. Nothing is uploaded at any point. This guide explains how to redact a screenshot with it, which cover-up style to use where, and the mistakes that leak data even after you thought you had hidden it.
Step one: take the screenshot as usual. Print Screen, Win+Shift+S on Windows, or Shift+Cmd+4 on a Mac. Step two: paste it straight in. Click anywhere on the page and press Ctrl+V (Cmd+V on a Mac) — the image loads directly from your clipboard, with no saving files first. You can also drag a PNG or JPG file onto the page, or click to browse. Step three: drag boxes over anything sensitive. Names, addresses, phone numbers, account numbers, API keys, barcodes, or a face in the background of a photo. Each box can use its own style — blackout, blur or pixelate — and you can drag boxes to reposition them, click a box to change its style, or press Delete to remove one and redraw. Zoom in for small text like a two-factor code in a status bar; that is where leaks usually happen. Step four: export the PNG. The redacted areas are permanent in the export — the original pixels are replaced, not covered — and EXIF metadata is stripped too. Share the export with confidence, and keep your original screenshot somewhere safe if you might need the unredacted version later.
Not all cover-ups are equal, and the difference matters most for text. Blackout paints a solid rectangle over the pixels and is the gold standard for text: once the export is saved, the original pixels are gone and there is nothing to reconstruct. Use it for names, numbers, keys, and anything in writing. Blur (Gaussian) and pixelate (mosaic) look friendlier and work well for faces or busy backgrounds, but they need to be strong. A light blur over large, high-contrast text can sometimes be partially reversed with sharpening tricks, so push the radius or block size high and check the result at full zoom. When in doubt, blackout wins — an ugly black bar never leaks. The rule of thumb from the tool itself is simple: text gets blackout, faces and backgrounds get blur or pixelate, and anything you are unsure about gets blackout.
A real estate agent wants to share a screenshot of a text thread with a buyer, but the thread shows the buyer's full name, phone number, and the property address. The screenshot is 1170 × 2532 pixels, a standard iPhone capture. She pastes it in, draws three blackout boxes — one over the contact name at the top (about 300 × 60 px), one over the phone number in a message bubble, and one over the street address — zooms to 100% to confirm no characters peek out at the edges, and exports. The result is a shareable PNG around 400 KB with zero readable personal data, and the exported file carries no EXIF location data because it is re-encoded from a canvas. The whole job takes under a minute, and the version she shares contains nothing that could identify the buyer.
A light blur on text. The most common leak: a gentle blur that still lets a determined reader sharpen the characters back. If it is text, black it out. Missing the edges. Notification previews at the top of the screen, a name half-visible at the edge of a message bubble, a reflection in a photo, text in the background of a photo — redaction covers what you can see, and it does not find sensitive text for you, so check the whole frame at 100% zoom before exporting. Sending the original alongside the redacted copy. The redacted PNG is safe; the original file attached to the same message is not. Upload only the redacted export — and remember that cloud photo services sometimes keep originals. Forgetting the small stuff. Two-factor codes in the status bar, a partial card number in a notification, a home address in a maps preview — zoom in, because scanner-sized and status-bar text is easy to under-cover. Trusting the marker pen. Drawing over text with a semi-transparent highlighter in a photo app is not redaction; the characters often show straight through. A solid blackout box is the only cover-up that guarantees nothing remains.
The honest limits are three. First, redaction covers what you can see — it does not find sensitive text for you, so you decide what to cover, and the pre-export zoom check is part of the job, not optional. Second, the tool works on one image at a time; for a folder of screenshots, repeat the thirty-second workflow per file. Third, redaction is permanent in the exported PNG, which is the point — keep your original screenshot somewhere safe if you might need the unredacted version later, and do not expect to undo an export. Two related jobs have their own guides: for faces in a photo rather than details in a document, our face blur guide anonymises everyone in the frame; for documents rather than screenshots, our PDF signing guide covers the signature workflow, and our PDF compression guide covers shrinking a document for email and upload portals. Redaction itself needs no account, no upload and no waiting — paste, cover, export, share.
Auto-detect faces or draw your own boxes before you share.
Draw, type or upload your signature — no watermark, no account.
Shrink a PDF for email and upload portals, free.