Everyone knows how carelessly platforms like Facebook or Instagram handle users' personal data. This is precisely why you should be careful not to reveal too much about yourself or your children. Here we introduce you to the best methods for anonymizing your images.
What ends up on the Internet once is difficult to delete when in doubt. For example, you have no control over who views, downloads, and distributes your photos. Therefore, you should think carefully about which images you upload and how you can anonymize those that you ultimately post.
There are various ways of doing this: The pixelation of images serves to protect children on the Internet or to protect the personal rights of third parties. The deletion of metadata in turn prevents unauthorized persons from viewing information about your whereabouts. Finally, if you want to protect your creative works online, you should protect photos with watermarks and not share them online in maximum resolution. We'll show you which free tools do these jobs for you.
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Pixelate your face: Simple functions in Paint.NET

There are many good reasons to obscure people in photos. One such application is recordings made by or with children on the Internet, which you should always anonymize to protect the little ones. No professional software is required for this, because the free Paint.NET program already offers practical functions for this.
Simply import any photo and use the selection rectangle or the lasso tool to generously determine the area that should be made unrecognizable - this can be the license plate number of your car in addition to a face.
Then click on "Effects | Distort | Resolve into Pixels" and use the slider to change the length of the edge. This determines how strong the pixelation is. Do not be squeamish here, otherwise the people shown may still be recognizable. To put it to the test, you can set the image zoom to 10 percent. Due to the smaller size, the face is partly recognizable despite the pixelation (see picture). The effect "Blur and soft focus | Gaussian soft focus" works in a similar way to pixelation.
But if you want to anonymize very strictly, you can simply place a black rectangle over faces instead of pixelation. In this way, the overpainted pixels can no longer be restored even with special methods - however, this disturbs the appearance of a photo significantly more.