GUIDE

How to blur a license plate in a photo

For marketplace listings, dashcam frames, and street shots. US plates or UK number plates — free, in-browser, ~20 seconds per photo.

Do it now: open the license plate blurrer
Drop the photo, box the plate, download. Nothing leaves your device.
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The method

  1. Open the photo at blurthat.com. Drag-drop works; so does pasting a dashcam frame straight from your clipboard.
  2. Drag a box over the plate. Plates are rectangles, so the box tool fits them exactly — no careful painting required. Slightly overshoot the edges; plate frames often repeat the dealer name you may also not want.
  3. Pixelate at block 15+, or use the bar. Pixelation keeps the listing photo looking natural. The solid bar removes any doubt. Light blur is the one option to avoid — plate text is high-contrast and blur-resistant reading techniques work best on exactly that.
  4. Repeat for every photo in the set. The plate you missed on photo 7 of 12 undoes the other eleven. Front, rear, and the three-quarter shots.
  5. Download as JPG. Marketplace-friendly, and the re-encode strips the EXIF metadata — including the GPS coordinates of your driveway.
Worth knowing: the photo's hidden metadata can say more than the plate. A phone photo of your car in your driveway typically embeds the GPS coordinates of your home. Big marketplaces strip this on upload; files sent by email, messenger, or cloud link usually keep it. Exporting through BlurThat strips it either way.

Should you blur your license plate?

Plate cloning is the concrete one: your plate number, printed onto a lookalike plate, on a similar car, collecting tolls and tickets in your name. Listings with clear plate photos of common cars are the raw material.

Location linking is the quiet one: a plate ties a photo to a registered vehicle, and the listing ties it to a neighborhood. Combined with "selling because we're moving next month," you've published more than you meant to.

None of this is likely per photo. It's just that the mitigation costs 20 seconds and zero dollars, which makes the expected-value math easy.

Number plates — same method, one extra warning

If you'd say number plate rather than license plate, nothing about the method changes: box the plate, pixelate, export. One thing to know — UK and EU number plates are bold black text on white or yellow, about the highest-contrast text a camera ever sees, which is exactly the kind of text that light blur fails to hide. To blur a number plate in a photo properly, go heavy on the pixelation (block 15+) or use the solid bar.

Dashcam and street photography

Posting dashcam clips or street shots with legible third-party plates is treated as personal data in some jurisdictions (much of the EU) and simply courteous elsewhere. The BRUSH tool handles plates at an angle; for a batch of frames, the box tool plus muscle memory is quick. Faces in the same frame? Same tool — guide here.

Blur the plate now
Free · no upload · EXIF stripped on export
OPEN TOOL

Questions

Should I blur my plate when selling my car?
Reasonable default: yes. Visible plates link the listing to you and your location and are clonable. Twenty seconds per photo to not think about it again.
Is pixelation enough, or do I need the bar?
Pixelation at block size 15+ on a normal listing photo makes the plate unreadable. If the plate is large in frame (close-up rear shot), go heavier or use the bar. If you can squint and guess a character, go heavier.
What about the GPS in the file?
BlurThat exports strip EXIF automatically — the download contains only visible pixels. This matters most for photos you share directly (email, chat) rather than through big marketplaces, which strip metadata themselves.
Does this work for UK number plates?
Yes — same tool, same 20 seconds. Number plates are unusually high-contrast text, so skip light blur: pixelate at block 15+ or use the bar.
I have a whole inventory of photos — is there a bulk mode?
BlurThat is one photo at a time: paste, box, download — about 20 seconds each once you're warm, so a 12-photo listing is a few minutes. There's no batch upload today.

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