Does removing the coordinates change how the photo looks?

Not visibly. It is written out again, so it is not byte-for-byte identical to the original, but the picture is the picture. If you only want the hidden fields removed and nothing covered, the file checker does that without re-encoding a JPEG at all.

Will it find an address on a parcel label?

Usually, if the label is in focus and roughly square to the camera. Check the result — a label at an angle is one of the harder cases, and a box dragged over it works just as well.

What about the street sign in the background?

Not found automatically today — reading signs out of a scene is a different problem from reading a label. Drag a box over it. That is the honest answer, and it is why the tool is there.

Available now

Blur an address in a photo

A photograph can give away where you live twice over: once in words — on a parcel, a letter, a door — and once in the coordinates your phone wrote into the file without mentioning it.

Covering the first and leaving the second is the mistake this page exists to prevent.

Works today, in your browser. Photos open in the editor and Word documents are checked for hidden data; either way the file is read on your device and never uploaded.

Cover an address How we can promise that

The address you can see

Text in the picture is read and anything shaped like a street address is grouped on its own: a number, a street name, and the words that usually go with them. A house number on its own is not enough to be sure, so it is left alone — drag a box over it if the picture shows your door.

It defaults to a solid box, like all text here, because a blurred street name in a standard font is a weaker redaction than it looks.

The address you cannot see

Most phones write GPS coordinates into every photograph, accurate to a few metres. A picture taken in your front room points at your front room, and nothing about looking at the picture tells you that.

The copy you download here carries none of it. A re-drawn picture has no metadata to carry, so the coordinates, the timestamp and the camera model all go as a consequence of the editing rather than as a step you might skip.

What a photo gives away besides the address

The view from a window, a distinctive building across the road, a school uniform, a bus stop sign, a reflection in a kettle. None of those are things a detector can reliably find, and all of them have been used to locate people.

Which is why the drawing tool is there and why the result is something to look at rather than something to trust. Detection finds a great deal; it does not find everything, and we will not tell you otherwise.

How to do it

1Open the photoAddresses and other text are found and covered.
2Cover anything else that places youDrag a box over a landmark or a door number.
3Save itThe written address is covered and the coordinates are gone.

Questions

Not visibly. It is written out again, so it is not byte-for-byte identical to the original, but the picture is the picture. If you only want the hidden fields removed and nothing covered, the file checker does that without re-encoding a JPEG at all.

We report no issues found, never “safe”. Absence of detections is not proof of absence, and detection is best-effort.