SteamBlur

SteamBlur hides faces in your photos and videos - blur them, pixelate them, or drop an emoji over them - entirely on your own Mac, with nothing ever uploaded anywhere.

Faces are found by Apple's own on-device Vision engine, so there is no model to download and no server round-trip. Drop a file on the left, watch the masked result on the right, save when it looks right.

Highlights

1. Three ways to hide a face - a soft gaussian blur, a chunky mosaic, or one of 32 emoji from your system font dropped on as a sticker.
2. Photos and video, one workflow - the same controls drive a single JPEG and a full clip, so nothing has to be re-learned.
3. See it before you commit - a photo re-renders as you drag a slider; a video shows twenty masked frames sampled across its length, plus a fast 480p scrub render.
4. Leave someone visible - click a face in a photo, or a person in the clip's cast list, to exempt them. Everyone else stays masked.
5. Masks that follow the person - faces are tracked across the whole clip and smoothed, so masks stay put through a turned head instead of flickering off for a few frames.
6. Tune the look - oval or box, soft or hard edge, and how far past the detected face the mask reaches. Whatever you last used is what the app reopens with.
7. Sound and quality kept - the original audio is muxed straight back in, and only the face regions are touched; the rest of the frame is re-encoded at the source's own bitrate.
8. Fully offline - no cloud, no telemetry, nothing uploaded. Every frame is detected and masked on your own Mac, and your photos never leave it.

How it works

Drop a photo or video into the left column, or open one with ⌘O. Faces are detected immediately and the right column shows the masked result - for a photo, the finished image; for a video, twenty frames sampled across the clip so you can check the mask at different moments. Adjust the style, strength and coverage until it looks right; the preview follows every change.

For video, "Find people" scans the whole clip once and lists everyone it saw, each with a thumbnail. From there you can exempt individuals, render a quick 480p version to scrub through, and then save the full-resolution file. Your settings carry over to the next launch, and recent files live in ~/Library/Application Support/SteamBlur/. Video support uses FFmpeg, which SteamBlur fetches into its own folder the first time you open a clip - photos need nothing extra.

Perfect for

1. Posting photos of a crowd - a party, a protest, a classroom: mask the bystanders, keep your friends recognisable.
2. Screen recordings and demos - anonymise the faces that wander through a webcam corner or a captured video call.
3. Journalists and researchers - protect a source's identity in footage without sending it to a web tool first.
4. Parents - share the school play or the birthday party without putting other people's children online.