TabTasker
Sharing photos, protecting identities
You take a photo at a public event, a protest, a school function, or a street scene. You want to share it, but there are faces in the frame: people who never agreed to being put online.
Blurring faces is one of the most practical privacy actions you can take, and AI makes it trivial.
When to blur faces
Consider blurring faces when:
- Children are in the photo. Parents may not want their children's faces online, and you have no way of knowing.
- Strangers are in the background. Street photography, public events, and crowd shots include people who didn't agree to be photographed.
- The context is sensitive. Photos from protests, medical facilities, legal proceedings, or private events.
- Local laws require it. GDPR and similar regulations give individuals rights over their biometric data, including facial images.
Manual vs. automatic face detection
Manual blurring means finding and blurring each face yourself. It's time-consuming, and it's easy to miss one. Automatic detection uses an AI model to scan the whole image and blur every face it finds. It's faster, more consistent, and far less likely to leave someone unblurred by accident.
TabTasker's Blur Faces tool uses a face detection model that runs locally in your browser. The image is analyzed on your device, faces are identified and blurred, and the result downloads instantly.
How it works
- Drop your image into the tool
- The face detection model scans the image and identifies face regions
- A Gaussian blur is applied to each detected face
- You can adjust the blur intensity
- Download the blurred image
The entire process happens in your browser. The image never leaves your device.
Limitations
- Very small faces. Faces that take up a tiny portion of the image may not be detected.
- Obstructed faces. Masks, hats, and heavy shadows can prevent detection.
- Profile views. Faces seen from the side are harder to detect than frontal faces.
- Low resolution. Blurry or pixelated images may not trigger detection.
Blur intensity matters
Too little blur and the face is still recognizable. Too much blur and the image looks unnatural. Most tools let you adjust the blur strength, so find a balance where the face is unrecognizable but the photo still looks natural.
It's not just about legality
Even when it's legal to share a photo with identifiable faces, it's worth thinking about whether it's respectful. The people in your photo didn't agree to be online, and blurring their faces is a small but meaningful thing you can do.
With AI face detection, the whole thing takes a few seconds. There's really no reason to skip it.
GDPR and biometric data
Under GDPR and similar privacy regulations, facial images are classified as biometric data. That's a special category, one that receives stronger protection than ordinary personal data. Publishing identifiable photos of people without their consent can create legal liability in the EU, the UK, and a growing number of other jurisdictions.
This affects more people than might expect. If you run a website, a blog, a social media account, or any online publication that features photos of identifiable people taken in the EU or UK, you may need valid legal grounds to publish them. Blurring faces is one way to remove that obligation entirely.
Journalism and activism contexts
For journalists, documentary photographers, and activists, face anonymisation is a professional and ethical standard. Publishing images from protests, conflict zones, or sensitive events with identifiable faces can put subjects at risk. In some cases it has done so.
Local face blurring is especially valuable here, because the original image never gets sent to a third-party server, and neither do the identities of the people in it. The tool processes the image entirely in your browser, so sensitive content stays where it belongs: on your device.
Beyond faces: other things worth blurring
Face blurring is the most common case, but it is not the only one. Consider also:
- Licence plates in photos of vehicles
- Street addresses visible on buildings or letterboxes
- Computer screens showing private information
- Documents or papers visible in the background of photos
The manual blur box feature lets you draw custom rectangles over any area of an image, not just detected faces, which makes it useful for all of these cases.