Image Blur
Soften a whole image with an adjustable Gaussian blur, on your device.
About this tool
One slider, a real Gaussian blur across the whole image, edges handled so borders don't fade to transparent. The radius scales with image size so the same setting looks the same on any resolution. Download as JPG.
Uses, and the one thing blur is not
Whole-image blur is a design material: the soft backdrop behind a headline, the frosted layer under a card, a placeholder while a real image loads, an abstract wash of a photo's own colours for a slide. The radius here scales with the image so a slider position means the same softness on a thumbnail and a 4K photo, and the image is drawn oversized so the edges stay solid instead of dissolving. What blur is NOT is redaction. Light and medium blurs of text can be partially reversed by deconvolution, and blurred faces have been re-identified from surrounding context, so anything genuinely sensitive should be pixelated at large block size or covered outright — the photo blur tool handles regions for hiding, and this page's honest advice is to blur hard or cover. Softening a subject's surroundings while keeping the subject sharp is a cutout job: the background remover first, this second, then recombine in the collage or an editor.
Frequently asked questions
Is blur safe for hiding text or faces?
Not reliably — light blur can be reversed, and heavily blurred faces still leak context. For real redaction, cover the area or pixelate with large blocks. This tool is for softening, not secrecy.
Why do the edges stay solid?
The image is drawn slightly oversized before blurring, so the blur kernel has pixels to sample past the border instead of transparency.
What's a good amount?
10–20 for a gentle soften, 30–50 for a frosted backdrop, 70+ for an abstract colour wash. The radius adapts to your image's size.
Is the image uploaded?
No — the blur runs in your browser using the canvas filter; the download is generated locally.