Privacy first. Your files stay on your device.

Share the file.
Keep the private parts.

Redact text, faces and sensitive details in PDFs and photos. Find a word or draw a box. Download a copy with those areas permanently removed.

Step-by-step guide
Cover private details. Keep the rest readable.Illustrative example · Your files stay on your device
1 Choose a file to redact

Up to 25 MB · No page-count cap · 24 MP photos. Choosing a file opens its private preview and scans printed English text on this device.

Find it by name

Get suggestions from the words in your document.

Cover any area

Draw over faces, signatures, codes or text.

Keep the original

Download a new, permanently redacted copy.

A private copy, made carefully

A black box should mean
the content is gone.

Drawing a shape in a PDF editor can leave readable text underneath. This tool creates a fresh file from the redacted page images, so the covered pixels and original text layers are not included.

Text recognition helps you find things. Your final review decides what stays visible.

Read the guide to redacting PDFs and photos →

Before you share

Are my files uploaded?

No. Your file, recognised text, search words and redaction selections stay in your browser. The text scanner downloads from WhatTheFile and runs on your device. No account or cloud AI service is used.

Can someone remove the black boxes?

The downloaded copy is built from new pixels with solid black areas. It does not contain the original pixels underneath those areas. PDFs are rebuilt as image-only pages without original text layers, attachments, comments or document metadata. Your original file is unchanged.

Does keyword search find everything?

No. English OCR can miss or misread words, especially handwriting, small text, rotated text and blurry scans. Suggestions come only from recognised text. Review every page and draw boxes over anything missed, including QR codes, faces and signatures.

What changes in a redacted PDF?

Every page becomes an image. Selectable text, links, interactive forms, digital signatures and accessibility tags are not preserved. Pages are rendered up to 180 DPI and a 2400-pixel longest edge. Photos download as PNG.

Which files can I redact?

Choose one PDF, JPG, PNG, WEBP, HEIC or HEIF under 25 MB. There is no fixed page-count limit; large documents depend on available device memory. Images are limited to 24 megapixels. Password-protected PDFs are not supported.