About this site

The search term is “blur image”, but almost nobody typing it wants an effect. They want one specific thing in one specific picture to stop being readable, usually because they are about to publish it and something has caught their eye. That is a narrow job with a clear success condition, and it is worth building for on its own rather than as one filter among thirty.

Building for it properly meant discovering something inconvenient: the covering people reach for first is the weakest one available, and the strongest one is the one that looks least impressive. A tool that does not say so is selling a feeling rather than a result.

So the solid fill is the default here, the two softer options carry a note explaining what they give up, and the guide layer exists to publish the paragraph most tools in this area would prefer you did not read.

The things left out were left out on purpose, and each of them is somebody else’s job:

• Decorative and artistic softening — tilt-shift, radial sweeps, motion streaks, vignettes. Those are judged by eye and belong in an effects tool.
• Softening what sits behind a portrait subject, as a look. That needs the subject separated from the scene first, which is a different piece of engineering entirely.
• Making a picture that is already unclear readable again. That is the opposite operation, and a site selling both would deserve to be trusted for neither.
• Sharpening of any kind.
• Painting an object out of a frame so the result looks untouched. This site covers visibly and on purpose; concealing the fact of a removal is a different promise.
• Applying a repeated mark across a set of files.

One more, and it is a gap rather than a boundary: there is no automatic number plate finder, because no plate model has been downloaded, timed and licence-checked by this project. Every figure on this site about a model’s size or its speed was read off a file that was actually served, and that is a standard worth more than a fuller feature list.

It is a static site. There is no server behind it, no account, no database and no route that could accept a picture even if something tried to send one. The picture never leaves this tab, so there is no copy of it to leak.

The one request this site makes to another domain is for the face-finding model, and it happens only after you press the control that names its size. That request carries no part of your picture — the model comes to you, not the other way round. The privacy page names the host and the file.

The covering itself is destructive by design. Regions are stored as fractions of the original, and saving re-runs every one of them against the full-resolution picture before anything is encoded. There is no mask, no layer, and nothing in the saved file that a viewer could switch off.

A handful of people who make picture tools that each do exactly one thing. Every one of them is drawn, written and argued out on its own, so that landing on it straight from a search is the normal way in rather than a detour.