How to blur or redact a screenshot in Snipping Tool

Snipping Tool has no blur tool, but it can redact

The Windows Snipping Tool cannot blur or pixelate part of a screenshot. Microsoft's own help page lists everything you can do to a snip after you take it: draw with the pen, mark with the highlighter, erase strokes, add shapes and emoji, crop, and use Text actions. Blur is not on the list, and neither is pixelate.

What it does have is better than a blur for most screenshots: redaction. Since late 2023 the Windows 11 app can read the text in a snip and lay solid black bars over the parts you choose. A black bar removes the pixels outright, while a blur only smears them, so if the goal is "nobody can read this", Snipping Tool already has the right tool. It sits under the Text actions button.

How to redact a screenshot with Quick Redact

Quick Redact blacks out email addresses and phone numbers in one click, and Redact text does the same for any other text you select. Both live under Text actions:

1. Press Win + Shift + S and capture the area you want. Click the notification to open the snip in the Snipping Tool editor.
2. Click Text actions in the toolbar. Snipping Tool runs text recognition on the image and highlights every block of text it found.
3. Click Quick redact. Every email address and phone number it recognized gets a black bar.
4. For anything else (a customer name, an order number, a balance), drag across that text to select it, right-click, and choose Redact text.
5. Save with Ctrl + S as PNG or JPEG, or copy with Ctrl + C and paste where you need it.

Microsoft introduced Text actions in Snipping Tool version 11.2308.33.0 in September 2023 and rolled it out gradually. If you do not see the button, update Snipping Tool from the Microsoft Store first.

What Quick Redact does not catch

Quick Redact only knows two patterns, emails and phone numbers, and it only sees text the OCR could read. Everything else you cover yourself:

• Names. A customer, a colleague, the account owner in the corner of a dashboard. Select and use Redact text.
• Numbers that are not phone numbers. Invoice totals, IBANs, order IDs, the last four digits of a card. Same fix.
• Anything that is not text. Profile photos, faces, signatures, a QR code, a map pin on a home address. OCR cannot select these, so Redact text cannot reach them.
• Text the OCR misreads. Tiny type, text over a busy background, or text in an image inside the screenshot may not be recognized at all. If a word is not highlighted after you click Text actions, it will not be redacted.

After Quick Redact, read the screenshot once as if you were the person receiving it, top to bottom, and cover anything that still identifies someone.

For everything else: the pen, never the highlighter

To cover an area Text actions cannot select, use the Pen at its thickest setting in solid black (or any solid color) and scribble until the area is fully covered. Once the image is saved, the stroke is just pixels and nothing remains underneath.

Do not use the Highlighter for this. It is translucent by design, so the text below stays readable, often perfectly so once someone bumps the contrast.

If you prefer clean rectangles to scribbles, open the image in Paint instead, draw a rectangle and set its fill to a solid color. Paint, like Snipping Tool, has no blur or pixelate effect.

Check the unredacted original Snipping Tool already saved

By default, Snipping Tool saves every capture to Pictures\Screenshots the moment you take it, before you redact anything. The automatic save arrived with Snipping Tool 11.2209.2.0 and has been on by default since. So after a careful redaction you can end up with two files: the clean one you shared, and the original with every name and number intact, sitting in a folder that may sync to OneDrive.

Two fixes, pick one:

• Delete the original from Pictures\Screenshots after you save the redacted copy.
• Turn it off: in Snipping Tool, open See more (the three dots), Settings, and switch off Automatically save original screenshots. Then only what you save yourself gets saved.

The same logic applies to the clipboard. If you copied the snip before redacting it and pasted it into a chat, the redaction you did afterwards did not travel with it.

When you want a blur or pixelation

Sometimes a black bar is the wrong look: a tutorial screenshot where a soft blur reads calmer, a product shot with a face in the background, a document where you want readers to see that something was there. Windows offers one built-in route. The Photos app has Background blur, which detects the subject of a photo and blurs everything around it, with a brush to adjust the blurred area. It was built for portraits, and bending it into a redaction tool on a screenshot is fiddly.

The quicker option is our free redact image tool. Drop the screenshot in, drag over the area, and choose a solid box, a blur or pixelation. It runs entirely in your browser, so the image is never uploaded, and it works the same on Windows, a Mac or a phone.

One caution if you choose blur or pixelation: keep it strong and cover a generous area. Short, predictable text such as a few digits can sometimes be recovered from light pixelation by trying candidates until one matches, which researchers have demonstrated with published tools. A solid box has no such weakness. The longer version of this argument, with every method ranked, is in how to redact a screenshot.

If the screenshot is of a web page, redact before you capture

Much of what people redact in Snipping Tool is a browser window: a Gmail inbox, an admin dashboard, a CRM record. For those there is a cleaner order of operations: hide the data in the page first, then take the screenshot, so the sensitive pixels never exist in any file, auto-saved original included.

That is what Blurr.ing does in Chrome, Edge, Brave and Arc. Draw a box over an area, click an element to blur it, or select a run of text, and the page itself is frosted while you work. Blur Text rules can blur emails, card numbers and other patterns wherever they appear. When you then capture, with Snipping Tool or with Blurr.ing's own screenshot shortcut, the blurs are already in the image. Drawing blurs is free and unlimited; the built-in capture includes five free screenshots.

For screenshots of desktop apps, Snipping Tool's Quick Redact plus the pen is a perfectly good workflow. Then check what it saved before you redacted.