Guide Checked 1 November 2026
Blur a
license plate.
Open the photo below, drag a box over the plate, save. It runs in your browser — nothing is uploaded — and saves at full size with location data removed. Use heavy pixelation for listings, a solid box for anything sensitive.
Blur, pixelate or block it out?
A plate only needs to be unreadable, but “unreadable to you” is not the same as unreadable. In 2016 researchers (McPherson, Shokri and Shmatikov) recognised faces and digits hidden by pixelation and YouTube-style blur by training neural networks on them.
| Method | Result | Catch | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Solid box | Nothing left to recover | Looks heavy-handed on a nice photo. We fill it with the area’s average colour so it sits quietly. | Safest |
| Heavy pixelation (8 blocks or fewer across) | Characters gone to the eye | Researchers have trained models to recognise pixelated faces and digits. Fine for a listing photo; use a solid box if the stakes are higher. | Good |
| Light blur or fine mosaic | Often still readable | The same research recovered information from YouTube-style blur. A plate with a few blurry characters can be guessed. | Avoid |
| Emoji or sticker on top | Depends on the app | Some apps keep the sticker as a separate layer that can be removed from the original file. Export a flattened copy. | Check |
When to blur
Holiday rental and hotel listings
Cars in the drive or on the street outside. Booking.com tells partners not to use photos with licence plates.
Selling a car
Classified ads rarely need the plate, and it links the car to your address.
Google Business Profile and social posts
Customers’ cars in the car park, staff faces, delivery vans.
Inside the property
Family photos on the wall, post and documents on the table, names on a whiteboard — Booking.com also bans personal information.
Booking.com partner help: “Don’t use photos that contain personal information, licence plates or screens – like television screens or open laptops.” (source). Google blurs faces and licence plates in its own Street View imagery for the same reason.
A whole listing to clean up?
Plates, faces and family photos across 20 pictures? The photo lab’s privacy option blurs them automatically while it fixes light and colour — nothing else is added or removed. It is an AI edit, so check each result. The first photo is free.
Open the photo lab→Then cut every size Booking.com, Airbnb and Google ask for — free, in your browser.
Free bulk resizer→Questions
How do I blur a license plate in a photo for free?
Open the photo in the tool at the top of this page, drag a box over the plate, choose pixelate or solid, and save. It runs in your browser: the photo is not uploaded, the saved copy is full size, and its location data is removed.
Is pixelating a license plate enough?
Heavy pixelation — about eight blocks or fewer across the plate — makes the characters unreadable to a person. Research (McPherson, Shokri and Shmatikov, 2016) showed that neural networks can still recognise faces and digits from pixelated and blurred images, so for anything sensitive a solid box is the safe choice.
Do I have to blur number plates on Booking.com?
Booking.com’s partner help says: “Don’t use photos that contain personal information, licence plates or screens – like television screens or open laptops.” Blurring the plate, or choosing a photo without the car, keeps you within that guidance.
Can I blur plates on many photos at once?
This free tool does one photo at a time. The Nest & Pixel photo lab has a privacy option that blurs faces, number plates and personal photos automatically while it fixes light and colour, for up to 20 photos per batch. It is done by an AI model, so check each result before publishing.
Can a blurred plate be un-blurred from my saved photo?
Not from the file this tool saves: the blocks or colour are written into the pixels and the original pixels are gone. Keep your unblurred original private, and do not post it anywhere.