Permanently remove areas from an image

Not from the file this tool gives you. The pixels inside each area are overwritten in the buffer that is about to be encoded, so the original values are gone before the file exists - there is nothing underneath to uncover, no hidden layer and no separate original embedded in the output. What this cannot do is protect a copy you already sent, or the original still sitting on your device. Redact first, then share, and keep in mind that the file you started with is untouched.

A black box drawn in a document editor, a slide deck or a PDF annotator is usually an object placed on top of the page. The content underneath is still stored in the file, and it can be recovered by moving the box, copying the text out, or opening the file with something that ignores annotations. Real redactions have been undone this way in published court filings and government documents. This tool has no layer to move: the pixels are replaced.

A solid block, because it discards everything in the area and leaves a single flat colour. Pixelation replaces each block with its average colour, which cannot be reversed either, but it does keep a coarse impression of what was there. Blur is the weakest of the three - a light blur over a face is a well-known way to leave it recognisable, and blurred numbers have been read back before. If the point is that nobody can tell, use a solid block.

No, and that is deliberate rather than a missing feature. An automatic sweep that finds nine faces out of ten produces a document its owner believes is clean, and the tenth face is the one that matters. Every area here is one you drew and can see. The tool tells you how many areas it removed, and it will never tell you that you found them all - that judgement is yours.

Because the areas are coordinates on a specific image. The rectangle that covers a name on the first page of a scanned form covers somebody's face on the second, and applying one set of rectangles to a folder would hand you a batch of files you believe are safe and some number that are not. The failure would be completely silent, so the feature is refused rather than offered with a warning.

Yes, as a side effect: the image is rebuilt from raw pixels, so EXIF data such as the camera model, the timestamp and any GPS coordinates is not carried into the output. That said, if metadata is your actual concern rather than something visible in the picture, the metadata remover is the tool that addresses it directly and tells you what was there.

No, and on this page that matters more than anywhere else on the site: the whole point is that the sensitive version stops existing, and uploading it to achieve that would be the opposite of the exercise. The image is decoded, redacted and re-encoded by your own browser on your own device, and a content security policy the browser enforces prevents this page from sending it to another domain.