Remove an address from a photo

Addresses show up in more places than the envelope. A delivery app prints the street, the apartment, the postal code, and sometimes a gate code on one card. A map screenshot repeats the same line under the pin. A listing photo includes the house number on the door. A photo of a bill shows the window of the envelope. Each of those is a visible address. Some of them also have a second, invisible one.

The address you can see

Cover every line that would let a person find the door. That includes the unit, the city, the postal code, and any access code printed beside the street. On a map, cover the pin label and the card at the bottom that repeats the place. On a photo of a building, cover the number on the door and any street sign that makes the block obvious. A stripe through the middle of “1842” leaves a house number. A box should include the whole glyph and a little paper around it.

Solid black is the right cover for type. A blur on a large house number often still reads as that number, especially if someone increases contrast later. Pixelate has the same limit when the blocks are smaller than the letters. My Private22 uses a coarse pixel block and a blur that only samples inside the rectangle, then makes those pixels opaque. Even so, if the text must be gone, paint it black. The guide on redacting text explains why the derivation still matters.

The location stored beside the picture

A screenshot from a phone often has no GPS tag. A photo from the camera often does. That tag can name a latitude and longitude even after you have painted over the street. Covering the visible text does not edit that tag, and deleting the tag does not cover the visible text. They are separate problems.

The PNG Redact writes contains the image data and no ancillary chunks. EXIF, GPS, and text metadata are not in that file. The check says so when it passes. This does not change the original in your camera roll. If you share the original, the location can still be attached. Share the export.

What the picture tool cannot fix

A filename like the street name, a caption, or the message you paste under the image will publish the address even if the pixels are clean. So will a reflection, a labeled package in the background, or a second photo in a collage. Look past the line you meant to hide.

If the file is HEIC, this browser may not be able to read it. Save a JPEG or PNG copy from the share sheet and open that. The HEIC original is not uploaded while you find out. For the wider habit of what else to cover, see hiding personal information in a screenshot.