A license plate is short text, so the safe way to hide it is an opaque block, not blur or pixelation, which can sometimes be read back. This page has no automatic plate detection: you draw the box yourself in a few seconds, and the exported copy is a new image without the photo's GPS position or camera details.
Why people hide plates
A plate on its own is a short string of letters and digits. In a photo, it becomes a link between a car, a place and a moment. Common reasons to cover it:
- Selling a car. Listing photos stay online long after the sale. A plate plus the town in the listing points to where the car is parked overnight.
- Dashcam and helmet-cam clips. A still of a near miss or a bad parking job may be worth sharing; the other driver's plate rarely needs to be part of it, and your own may be visible in a reflection or a second car's footage.
- Neighborhood and community posts. A photo of a car blocking a driveway can quickly turn into a pile-on against the wrong person.
- Car meets, road trips and travel photos. Your car in front of your house, your workplace or a hotel says more about your routine than you might want.
There is also a misuse angle. The UK government describes "cloning" as someone copying your number plate and using it on a different vehicle, and lists fines or charges for journeys that were not yours as one way people find out. Clear, close-up plate photos are easy material for that.
Big mapping services treat plates as something to hide too: Google's help pages say Street View imagery uses technology designed to blur identifiable faces and license plates, and people can ask for their vehicle to be blurred further.
Cover the plate in four steps
- Choose the car photo with the file button, or drag it in. On a phone, pick it from your camera roll.
- Drag a box over the plate. Leave a margin of a few pixels on every side so no edge of a character shows. Do the same for the rear plate, a front plate, or a second car.
- Keep Cover with on Solid block. Plates are text, and text under Pixelate or Blur can sometimes be read back.
- Press Export, zoom in on the new copy to make sure the plate is fully covered, and save it.
No automatic plate detection, and why
This page does not detect plates for you. Plate detectors that we looked at were either too large to download in a browser for a few seconds of work, or came with license terms we could not accept for a site like this. Drawing one box is quick, and it means nothing is covered or left uncovered without you seeing it.
Find text can still help. It reads the picture on your device and, on this page, puts a box around every word or group of letters and digits it manages to read. A sharp plate facing the camera usually gets one, together with any other writing in the photo: a dealer's name on the plate frame, street signs, stickers. Remove the boxes you do not need. A plate shot at an angle, from far away, in shadow or caked in dirt is often not read at all and gets no box, so look at every plate and draw the missing boxes yourself.
Other things on a car that identify it
The plate is the obvious one. While the photo is open, check for:
- The VIN. Most cars show the vehicle identification number through the bottom of the windshield, and it is printed on the door-jamb sticker. It is a permanent ID for the car. Listings often show it on purpose so buyers can run a history report; if you do not intend to, cover it.
- Plate frames and dealer badges that name a dealership and its town.
- Parking permits, toll tags, residents' stickers and school or employer decals on the windshield.
- Personalized plates and bumper stickers that point to your name, team, school or job.
- Your house number, street sign or garage in the background, and faces of people nearby.
- Reflections: another car's plate mirrored in your paint or a shop window.
Any of them can get its own box. For people in the shot, the face cover tool can find faces automatically.
Why not just blur it
Blur looks tidier than a black rectangle, which is why videos and listings use it. But a plate is exactly the kind of content blur and mosaics handle worst: a small set of characters in a known, standardized font. Researchers at Bishop Fox showed in 2022 that pixelated text can be rebuilt by guessing characters, pixelating each guess and comparing the blocks, and they recommend black bars over the whole text instead. On this page, Pixelate and Blur are marked as decorative for that reason.
What the exported photo contains
Export creates a new image from scratch:
- the plate area holds only the black block, and the pixels that were there are not in the file;
- the GPS coordinates your phone may have saved, along with the camera model, capture time and the rest of the EXIF, XMP and IPTC data, are not copied into the new file. For a car photographed outside your home, that location tag would otherwise give away your address;
- JPEG, PNG and WebP keep their format; an HEIC photo opened in Safari is saved as JPEG;
- the full resolution is kept. What you see on screen is a lighter copy (about 2,048 pixels along its bigger side); the box is converted back to the real photo's coordinates for the export. A browser that cannot encode the whole photo produces one 4,096 pixels along its bigger side instead and tells you.
Photos and devices
- Every current browser opens JPEG, PNG and WebP; HEIC needs Safari, and elsewhere the page asks for a JPG version.
- Dashcam stills: save the frame as an image first (most dashcam apps have a snapshot button). Video files are not supported here.
- Works the same on a laptop, an Android phone, an iPhone or an iPad. With a keyboard you can also click a box and nudge it with the arrow keys, or press Delete to remove it.
- Several photos of the same car can be opened together; each is exported as its own file, and you can also save them all as one zip.
What happens to the photo
The photo is opened inside your browser tab and stays there. Drawing, covering and exporting all happen in the tab, and the new copy is held in memory until you save it. Nothing is uploaded: this site serves static files only and has no address that accepts pictures. If you press Find text, the text reader is downloaded from this site; your photo is not part of that download.
For the technically curious
The editor keeps your box in the original photo's pixel coordinates, then paints the full-size picture and the black fill onto a new canvas and encodes it, in a background worker when the browser supports it. Re-encoding is what leaves the metadata behind. You can keep an eye on the developer tools' Network tab while you do this; the verification guide explains what you should and should not see there.
FAQ
Can this tool find license plates automatically?
No. There is no automatic plate detection. You draw the box, which takes a few seconds and lets you check that the whole plate is covered.
Will Find text pick up the plate?
Often, when the plate is sharp and readable. On this page it boxes every piece of text it can read, letters and digits alike, so the plate is boxed along with signs, stickers and other writing. A plate the reader cannot make out gets no box, so check each one and draw any missing box by hand.
Is blurring a plate enough?
It is not a reliable way to hide it. Plates use standard fonts and few characters, which is the easiest case for reconstruction. Use the solid block.
Should I cover the VIN too?
Cover it unless you mean to share it. A VIN identifies the car for good. Some buyers expect to see it, so in a sale listing that is your call.
Does the photo still show where I parked?
No location tag survives the export, because the new file has no EXIF at all. Street signs, house numbers and landmarks in the picture are still visible unless you cover them.
Can I do this on my phone?
Yes. In a phone browser the box is drawn with a finger, and the share button saves the exported copy to your photos.
Sources
Checked 2026-10-11.
- GOV.UK, "What to do if your number plate is cloned": definition of plate cloning and how victims find out.
- Google Maps Help, "Blur Street View imagery": automatic blurring of faces and plates and blur requests.
- Bishop Fox, Unredacter announcement (2022): rebuilding pixelated text and the case for solid bars.
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