Apply a mosaic or pixelation effect to any image, right in the browser — adjust the block size and see the result live.
Pixelation divides an image into blocks of a fixed size and fills each block with a single colour — the average of everything inside it. The result is the mosaic effect familiar from television when a face needs to be hidden: the larger the block, the less recognisable the content becomes. This tool does it entirely in your browser, using a canvas element and no server round-trip, so the image you upload never leaves your device.
The technique is simple and intentionally crude. The canvas is first drawn at a fraction of the real resolution — the width divided by the block size — and then scaled back up with image smoothing turned off. Each original pixel is replaced by its nearest neighbour at the reduced scale, which is what produces the sharp, hard-edged blocks. The operation is instantaneous even on large images because the browser's internal scaling does all the work in one pass.
Common uses: blurring a licence plate or a face before sharing a photo online, preparing screenshots for a bug report where personal data needs to be hidden, or creating the retro pixel-art effect that some designers like. The slider goes from 2 pixels — barely visible — to 80, which reduces a 1080p image to about 25 blocks across. The result is a new image file with no recoverable detail inside the blocks: unlike a Gaussian blur, pixelation is irreversible, and that is the point.
No. Pixelation replaces a group of pixels with a single value and the original information is discarded. Unlike a blur filter, there is no mathematical inverse.
No. The canvas operation runs locally and no data is uploaded, stored or transmitted.
The upload limit is 20 MB. Very large images may slow down on mobile devices, but the browser handles the scaling.
This tool applies the effect to the entire image. To pixelate a region, crop the area first with the image cropper, pixelate it, and composite it back in an image editor.
Not technically. A blur averages pixels with their neighbours in a smooth gradient; pixelation replaces entire blocks with a single flat colour. Both hide detail, but pixelation is visually distinctive and slightly harder to reverse-engineer.
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