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How to blur faces in a screenshot on Mac

Sharing a screenshot of a team photo, a bank statement or a customer record? Hide the private bits as you copy it, so the original never reaches the chat.

An illustration of four people at a computer, their faces pixelated

Steps

  1. Press ⇧⌘2 and drag over what you want to share.
  2. Press I to copy it as an image.
  3. Pluck finds faces, card and account numbers, emails, phone numbers and addresses, and pixelates them before the image reaches the clipboard. A confirmation says how many it hid.
  4. Want to hide something else? Click Edit hidden areas, drag a box over it, pick blur or pixelate, and press Done.
  5. Paste the image into Slack, Messages, email or a ticket.

Tips

  • Undo in the confirmation brings back the original if Pluck hid something you need.
  • Choose pixels or blur, and which kinds of detail are hidden automatically, in Settings › General.
  • The original, unhidden image is never kept on the clipboard or in your clipboard history.
  • Pluck also spots one-time codes, passwords, recovery phrases and crypto wallets, so they don't slip into a bug report.

Without Pluck

macOS has no built-in blur. You can take a screenshot with ⇧⌘4, open it in Preview, and draw filled shapes over each face with Markup. It works, but it's slow, the boxes look heavy, and it's easy to miss a detail in a busy image.