Enhancing privacy - how to blur or pixelate portions of your photos

While working on the PEP Community badge, some people may find the desire or need to respect the privacy of event attendees, or individuals who were unable to provide consent to sharing their photo online.  

Here are some examples:
Perhaps there are children attending your workshop, or strangers in the background, or maybe you're leading a service project in the wake of a natural disaster, or are helping refugees, or maybe there are SO many people in your presentation that it would take too long time to get everyone's permission.  That'd be great, right?  Or perhaps you don't want to disclose the location of a home or permablitz project worksite, and need to hide street signs or recipients' faces?

Whatever the reason, countries vary on what can legally be shared without consent.  For instance some countries may require not just faces, but also clothes and tattoos or other distinguishing marks to be edited and blurred out.  Likewise some countries enable public buildings viewable from the street to be photographed and shared, but do not allow private homes and the like without permission.

How can I blur or pixelate an image so that it looks professional while enhancing privacy?

Photoshop is a very professional program, but it costs money.  Fortunately there are free and open source alternatives, like the GNU Image Manipulation Program, so you don't have to fork over any £ to add privacy to your images.  The learning curve for doing this in GIMP isn't too steep.  Here's how to enhance privacy in your photos using GIMP:

1. Download GIMP from their website.
2. Install it to your computer.
3. Open the software, and then open your photo, or a copy of your photo if you want to keep the original intact.
4. To Smudge: Hit 'S' to use the smudge tool, smearing out any distinguishable features where appropriate.  Or...
5. To Pixilate: Hit 'E' or 'R' to choose the 'Ellipse' or 'Rectangle' select tool.  Then click and drag the areas you want pixelized.  After that...
 a. Right click.
 b. Filters
 c. Blur
 d. Pixelize
 e. In the new little window, hit 'Okay'

That's it!  Here's an example of what it looks like on some completely random weird stranger on the web.

Looks like a Minecraft character.

But wait, there's more!

Inkscape is another free and open source image software you can use.  It’s great for making smooth vector graphics that aren’t pixelated.  Check out www.inkscape.org to download.

1. How to block stuff out with a rectangle.

After downloading, check out the tutorials under the Help menu to learn how to draw a rectangle

Open your image and draw a rectangle wherever you'd like one in order to block out stuff.  

Use a screen capture or Inkscape's "Export PNG image" to convert your creation from vector graphic *SVG file into a *PNG file you can upload to the site.

Alternatively...

2. How to blur stuff out with Inkscape.
(Spoiler: Basically, we're going to make a Doppelgänger photo sitting right on top of the original.  We're going to blur this Doppelgänger and then clip away at it to strategically and fancily block the original image underneath.  Kinda' like making a "paper doll" outfit to block the original.)  

1. Start Inkscape and then open a copy of the image you’d like blurred.
Right click on the image, then select Duplicate.   You have now made a Doppelgänger!  You may not realize it's a duplicate until later.
Now let’s blur that entire Doppelgänger...after we blur it we’ll clip away the parts we don’t want blurred, leaving the original underneath.
To blur it, on the top menu bar, click Filters, Blurs, then Blur…, Apply, Close.  The "Live Preview" feature lets you know how blurry it will be.  Feel free to play around with other filters, too.

The Doppelgänger is now blurry, covering the entire original.  Next step.

2. Select a shape (or draw your own fancy one with the Bezier tool) and put it where you want to censor or “clip” .
Shift-click the Doppelgänger image with that shape, so that both the shape and the blurred image are selected at the same time.

3.  With both the shape and duplicate image selected
On the menu bar…
Object,
Clip,
   Set.

This will erase the rest of the blurred Doppelganger image, leaving only the blurred shape covering the original image.  Repeat steps as needed for multiple blurry shapes.

For those who perhaps don't have a device that will run the excellent and powerful programs GIMP or Inkscape, there's an online app, Pixlr, which works on most devices and has the capacity to do some of the same things as GIMP. The free version is full of ads, but still usable. It used to be rather limited, but they've done some updates over the past year making it far more useful.

Another option, for those that have Microsoft Paint, is just to color over the people's faces. If you use the "color picker" (sometimes called "eye dropper") tool, you can kind of match the color of their faces. It looks a bit funny, but who cares!

Using Paul's face again, here's how to blank it out with Paint:

first select the color-picker tool and then click a spot on the face

Then:

I think the Brush tool usually is automatically selected. But, if it's not, just click it and then scribble on the face like a toddler!

Save the image, and you're done!

And here's an example, featuring my piratical family!

Aren't our faces absolutely lovely?