How to blur faces and hide text in photos and videos on a Mac

Hide a face, a name or a number plate before you share a photo or a video, with Preview, Photos, a free editor or Beckon, without uploading it anywhere.

David Oti Founder, Beckon

27 October 2026

Before a photo or a screen recording goes into a bug report, a listing, a group chat or a blog post, there’s often something to hide first: a face, a name, a number plate, an address, an email in a screenshot. Here are the ways to do it on a Mac, and what to watch out for.

First: hide it properly

Make it part of the picture. A box that’s only an annotation on top can sometimes be taken off by whoever gets the file. What you send should have the pixels themselves covered.
Blur hard, or use a solid box. A light blur over text can sometimes be read back. For text and numbers, solid is safest.
Mind the details. A photo carries where and when it was taken. Hiding a face doesn’t hide the location.

Photos: Clean Up

On a Mac with Apple Intelligence turned on, open the photo in Photos, click Edit, then Clean Up, and brush over a face: instead of removing it, Photos covers it with a pixelated mosaic. Quick, but only for faces, only for photos in your library, and only on Macs with Apple Intelligence.

Preview: boxes on images, Redact for PDFs

For an image, open it in Preview, show the Markup toolbar, draw a rectangle from Shapes, and set its fill colour to black. When you save a JPEG or PNG, the box becomes part of the picture. Preview saves over the original, so choose File → Duplicate first if you want to keep it. There’s no blur: boxes only.

For a PDF, Preview has a real redaction tool: Tools → Redact, then drag over the text or the area. When the document is saved, what’s under the black bars is removed, not just covered.

Video: a full editor

QuickTime and iMovie can’t blur part of the picture. For video you need an editor with a blur effect and, if what you’re hiding moves, a tracker that follows it. DaVinci Resolve’s free version does both, with a learning curve. Online tools do it in the browser, but they mean uploading your video to someone else.

Redact, with Beckon

Beckon puts your Dock in a ring around the pointer, and when you’re dragging files, the ring has two more slots: Convert and Actions. Drag the photo, press ⌥Space, point at Actions and drop it on Redact, and it opens in a window:

Beckon's Redact window: a photo with the face blurred and the number plate covered, with Solid, Blur and Pixelate, Find Faces, Find Text and Save Redacted Copy — Find Faces and Find Text box them for you; Save Redacted Copy burns them in.

Find Faces and Find Text put a box over every face and every piece of text. Take off any you want to keep.
Draw more boxes yourself, and move or resize them.
Solid, Blur or Pixelate, strong enough that nothing under them can be read.
Save Redacted Copy saves a new image with the boxes burnt in, and without the original’s details: no location, no date. The original isn’t touched.

For a video, Redact works the same way, with boxes that are Solid or Blur. Draw a box and it’s on from that moment to the end; drag its range on the strip below to set when it starts and stops. Beckon doesn’t track things that move, so it suits what stays put: a name in a screen recording, a sign, a face in a talking-head clip. For a face that moves around the frame, use an editor with a tracker.

Redact is part of Beckon Pro, which is $24 once, and every download starts with 14 days of Pro. The drop actions guide has every tool, including Remove location, which takes just the GPS position out of a photo.

Download for Mac — free