Redact text before sharing an image

Text in an image is still text. A chat screenshot, a banking balance, a boarding pass, a tracking number, and a two-factor code are all readable by a person, and several of them are readable by a scanner. Redacting them means replacing the pixels, not decorating the picture.

Why solid black is the default

Pixelate and blur start from the original samples. They average or block those samples, then My Private22 writes the result back and sets the alpha to fully opaque. There is no second layer to peel off. That is better than a translucent marker. It is still a transformation of the letters. With a large font and a mild blur, the word can remain obvious. A sharpen or a guess is sometimes enough to recover a short code. Solid black does not have that path: every pixel in the box is opaque black, and the export check confirms that is what the file contains.

Use pixelate or blur only when you are comfortable with the chance that the shape of the text survives. Labels, headlines, and one-time codes are the wrong place for that chance. The editor says this next to the style buttons, because it is easy to treat a blur as a promise.

How to draw the box

• Include the whole letter, the accents, and the punctuation. A line through the middle is not redaction.
• Leave a small margin. Descenders and underlines sit lower than the word looks.
• Cover an entire QR code or barcode. A remaining corner can still scan.
• Cover message previews in the status bar, not only the conversation you opened the screenshot to show.
• If two boxes overlap, the later one is painted on top. A solid box on top of a blur is black.

You can move and resize a box after you draw it. Undo is Ctrl+Z or ⌘Z. If a box was a slip of the finger, delete it rather than covering it with the hope that a second box hides the mistake. Both will be flattened, but a stray blur at the edge of a sentence is how a digit gets left behind.

Read the file you are about to send

Export writes a PNG and then decodes it. When you marked regions and the checks pass, the page uses one sentence: the redacted areas are permanently removed. Download is offered only after that check, or after the honest result when you marked nothing. That second result says the metadata was removed and the picture is unchanged. Do not treat it as a redaction. It is the tool refusing to pretend.

If you then move a box, the check is cleared. The previous PNG is no longer a description of the picture on screen. Export again. Open the download and look at it. The verified line is about pixels and metadata, not about whether you covered the right words. That judgment is still yours. In this browser you draw every box. Gallery Pro, on iPhone, can suggest a box for an email, a phone number, a card, an ID number, or a face, and it waits for you to confirm it. For addresses in particular, including the postal code and any GPS tag, see removing an address from a photo.