Child-safety guidance from the NSPCC says not to put children's names next to their photos, to watch for identifying details like school uniforms, and to remove location data before uploading. This tool finds faces on your device, covers the ones you choose with solid blocks, and exports a new copy that carries no GPS or other photo metadata.
Sharing photos with other people's children in them
Children turn up in a lot of the photos parents take: the class play, the soccer team after a win, a birthday party, a field trip, a playdate. Posting or forwarding those pictures is part of family life, and most people do it. A 2020 Pew Research Center survey found that 82% of parents who use social media had posted photos, videos or other information about their children there.
The tricky part is that a group photo includes children whose parents may feel differently. Some families keep their kids off social media entirely. Some have personal reasons to keep a child's location private. Some just prefer to decide for themselves. You rarely know which family is which, and asking every parent in a team photo is not realistic.
Covering the faces of the children who are not yours is a simple way to share the moment without making that decision for anyone else.
How to cover children's faces
- Open the photo, or several from the same event, with the file button or by dropping them on the page.
- Tap or click Find faces. On first use the face finder downloads from this site (about 1 MB, shown before it starts); after that it runs on your device and boxes every face it detects in each loaded photo.
- Take the box off any face that should stay visible, such as your own child's. Add boxes for any child the finder missed.
- Keep Cover with on Solid block when a child should not be recognizable. Blur gives a softer look but can be partly undone.
- Look for names and logos (next section), box them too, then press Export and save the copies.
Children's faces that the finder may miss
The face finder works best on faces turned toward the camera. Kids rarely cooperate. Check by eye for:
- children looking down at a ball, a cake or a phone;
- faces in profile, half behind another child, or turned away;
- hats, sports helmets, swim goggles, costumes and face paint;
- very small faces at the back of a class photo or across a playing field;
- motion blur from running and jumping, and harsh sun or stage lighting;
- faces in the background: in the crowd at a game, on a poster, in a window reflection.
If a box is missing, draw it. Nothing is covered or left out without you seeing it on screen.
It is not only faces
UK child-protection charity NSPCC's guidance on photographing children points out that details other than the face can identify a child or reveal where they are. Before you export, look for:
- Names: on jerseys, name tags, labels on backpacks and water bottles, cubby hooks, artwork on the wall, birthday banners and cakes.
- School and club identifiers: uniforms with crests, team names, a school sign or bus, a gym banner.
- Places: a house number, a street sign, a distinctive storefront near the school.
- Numbers on jerseys together with a team name, which can be matched to a public roster.
The same guidance advises not supplying children's names along with their images, so it is worth checking your caption too. Box any of the above; it is covered the same way as a face.
Location data in the photo file
Phones often store the exact GPS position where a photo was taken inside the file. For pictures taken at home, at school or at a regular practice field, that position tells a stranger where to find a child at a predictable time. The NSPCC guidance specifically recommends making sure location data and other image metadata are removed before photos are uploaded.
Exporting from this page takes care of that automatically. The new copy is drawn from the visible pixels only, so the GPS coordinates are gone, along with the capture time, the camera model and every other hidden field. If you want to share a photo of your own child with no covering at all, but still without the location, use remove the location from a photo instead; it keeps every pixel as it was.
Solid block or blur for a child's face
A soft blur looks friendlier in a family photo, and for a casual post among friends that may be all you want. Be aware that it is not a reliable hiding method. In a 2016 study, researchers recognized more than half of the faces that had been blurred with YouTube's face-blur tool, using an ordinary image-recognition network. The solid black block keeps nothing of the face. When a parent has asked that their child not be identifiable, use the solid block.
What you get
- A new image for each photo with the covers burned into the pixels.
- No hidden metadata from the original, including location.
- The same format as the original (JPEG, PNG or WebP), or JPEG for an HEIC photo opened in Safari.
- Full resolution. You work on a preview capped near 2,048 pixels in width or height; the saved copy uses every original pixel, except on a phone that runs short of memory, where the result is limited to 4,096 pixels across its larger dimension and a message tells you.
- With several photos, one file each, plus the option to save them all as a single zip.
Phones, formats and limits
- Works in current browsers on iPhone, iPad, Android and computers. On a phone, tap Find faces, adjust the boxes with a finger, then share the result straight to a chat or a photo app.
- JPEG, PNG and WebP open everywhere. iPhone HEIC photos open in Safari; in Chrome or Firefox, convert them to JPG first.
- Still photos only, not videos.
Your family photos stay on your phone
The photos are opened in your browser and are not sent to this site or any other. The face finder is downloaded to your browser once and runs there. The covered copies are created in memory and handed to you to save or share; when you close the page, nothing remains in it. This site has no accounts, no gallery and no storage, so there is nowhere for a photo to be kept.
How the face finder works
The finder is the YuNet face detection model from the OpenCV model zoo, running in your browser through TensorFlow.js (its WebAssembly backend). Its training covered faces from about 10 × 10 up to 300 × 300 pixels, which suits group photos. Box positions are kept in the original photo's pixels and applied at full size on export. You can confirm that your photos stay local by watching your browser's Network panel; the methodology page shows how.
FAQ
Should I cover other children's faces before posting a team photo?
It is a considerate default when you do not know every family's wishes. Covering the faces of children who are not yours lets you share the moment without deciding for other parents.
Does the face finder upload the photos?
No. The finder comes to your device once and does its work there; the photos never travel.
Why did it miss a child?
Faces turned away, under helmets or hats, in face paint, or very small in the frame are hard to detect. Draw a box over any face that has no box before you export.
Does the shared photo still show where it was taken?
No. What you save is freshly encoded and holds no GPS position or other EXIF fields. Visible clues, like a school sign, still need to be covered.
Is blurring a child's face enough?
For a casual post it may be what you want visually, but blur can be partly reversed. Use the solid block when a child should not be recognizable.
Can I process all the photos from one event at once?
Yes. Load them together, press Find faces once to box faces in every photo, step through them to adjust, and export them all.
Sources
Checked 2026-10-11.
- NSPCC Learning, photography and sharing images guidance: names with images, identifying details such as uniforms, removing location data before upload.
- Pew Research Center, July 28, 2020: 82% of social-media-using parents have posted about their children.
- arXiv 1609.00408: neural networks recognizing YouTube-blurred faces in 57.75% of cases.
- YuNet in the OpenCV model zoo: the on-device face detection model.
Last updated: