Screenshot Redactor

Getting a clean redaction takes about thirty seconds. Take your screenshot as usual — Print Screen, Win+Shift+S on Windows, or Shift+Cmd+4 on a Mac — then click anywhere on the page and press Ctrl+V (Cmd+V on a Mac) to paste it straight from your clipboard. You can also drag a PNG or JPG file onto the page, or click to browse.

Click and drag 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 delete and redraw if you miss a spot. Zoom in for small text like a two-factor code in a status bar; that is where leaks usually happen. When every sensitive region is covered, export the PNG and share it with confidence.

Not all cover-ups are equal. 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.

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.

Redaction covers what you can see. It does not find sensitive text for you — you decide what to cover, so double-check reflections in photos, notification previews at the top of the screen, and text in the background of a photo before exporting. The tool works on one image at a time; for a folder of screenshots, repeat the thirty-second workflow per file. Finally, 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.