How to Redact a Screenshot on Windows

Everything Windows already gives you

Before installing anything, it is worth knowing what is already on the machine. Windows can do more of this than most people realise — and it stops in places most people don't find out about until after they have sent something.

Below is every built-in route, in the order you would actually reach for them, each with its limit stated plainly. No tool in this article costs anything.

1. Snipping Tool → Scan Text → Quick Redact

The fastest option, and the one hardly anyone knows exists. Available on Windows 11, in any Snipping Tool from late 2023 onwards — if you don't see the buttons below, update the Snipping Tool from the Microsoft Store.

1. Open the Snipping Tool from the Start menu.
2. Click New and drag across the part of the screen you want. The capture opens in the Snipping Tool window, ready to work on.
3. Click Scan Text in the toolbar. The tool reads the text in the image. (Older builds label the same button Text Actions.)
4. Click Quick Redact. The two things it recognises are blacked out immediately — email addresses and phone numbers.
5. Save with Ctrl + S.

Why not Win + Shift + S? That shortcut takes the same capture, but where it ends up depends on your settings: usually the clipboard and your Screenshots folder, without the editing window opening by itself. Starting from the app is the route that always lands you in front of the tools.

Where it stops. Two limits, and both matter more than they sound.

It only works on text it managed to read. A logo, a label inside a chart, a signature in a scanned document, anything in an unusual font — none of that is text as far as the tool is concerned, so none of it gets touched.

And it only finds patterns. An email address has a recognisable shape; so does a phone number; and those two are the whole list it looks for. A person's name does not. A company name does not. An address does not. To the software they are ordinary words, and no amount of improvement will change that — there is nothing in them to recognise. Which is unfortunate, because those are usually the things you were worried about.

2. Snipping Tool → redact selected text by hand

For the things Quick Redact walked past.

1. Still in Scan Text mode, drag across the text you want gone.
2. Right-click the selection and choose Redact.

Where it stops. Same first limit: it only offers this on text it managed to read. If the text sits inside an image, a chart or a screenshot-of-a-screenshot, there is nothing to select. It is also one selection at a time, which is fine for three names and tedious for thirty.

3. Paint

Still installed on every Windows machine, and still perfectly capable of covering something up.

1. Open the image in Paint.
2. Set both Colour 1 and Colour 2 to black — the fill comes from Colour 2, not the main colour.
3. Choose the rectangle under Shapes and set Fill to Solid colour.
4. Draw over what you want gone.
5. Save as PNG.

Where it stops. Nothing helps you find what to cover — that is entirely on you, on every capture, from scratch. Its one real advantage is that a solid filled rectangle is unambiguous: nothing shows through, and nothing is left underneath.

4. What Windows does not have at all

This is the part worth knowing before you go looking for it.

There is no blur, and no pixelation. Neither the Snipping Tool nor Paint has a button for either one. (The Photos app does have a background blur, and with its brush you can aim it at part of a screenshot — but it is built for photographs, it opens by guessing at a subject, and it means a second app and a second save. The details are here.) The built-in tools can put a solid block over something, and that is the whole range. If you want the softer treatment — the one that shows there was something there without showing what — Windows has no way to do it.

Whether that matters depends on the job. A black bar is honest and final, and for a card number it is the right answer. But cover a busy screen in black bars and it stops reading as a screenshot: what arrives looks like a censored file, which is not always the impression you want to give a client.

Why a black box in a document is not redaction

A warning that belongs in any article about these tools, because it catches people constantly.

Everything above works on images, and on an image it genuinely works: you have replaced pixels with other pixels, and what was underneath no longer exists in the file.

Doing the same thing in a PDF or a Word document is a different story. A black rectangle drawn there is a shape sitting on top of the text. The text is still in the file and comes straight back out by selecting and copying it. You see a black bar, the recipient sees a black bar, and underneath it is everything you meant to remove.

True redaction that destroys the underlying text exists in the paid Acrobat Pro. The free Acrobat Reader does not have it. Word has its own additions to the problem: tracked changes, and the author's name sitting in the document properties.

Which leads to a slightly counter-intuitive rule: when in doubt, screenshot the document and redact the screenshot. An image has no text layer to leak.

Which one to use when

Five of those six rows need nothing beyond what is already installed — the document row too, if you take the screenshot route rather than buy Acrobat. That is genuinely most of the job, and if your situation is in one of those rows you can close this page.

The one case the built-in tools handle badly

It is the fourth row: a busy screen with a lot of small things scattered across it.

The reason is not that covering things is hard. It is that the mistake is silent. You cover everything you noticed, and the one thing you didn't notice stays — nothing tells you, the picture looks finished. You find out afterwards, from the person who received it.

Which is why the tool I ended up building works the other way round: the capture opens with everything already hidden, and you brush over only the part you meant to show. There is no "missed one", because you were never covering anything. It is a $9.99 app in the Microsoft Store with a 15-day trial, and for the five rows above you do not need it.

Why I built this

My colleagues and I take 10-15 screenshots on a normal day — show this part of the screen, then that part, then a third — and every one of them has to keep enough context to make sense while showing nothing that shouldn't be there.

Doing that by hand, that many times a day, is how you learn exactly where the built-in tools stop. Not because any single screenshot is difficult, but because the fifteenth one, at the end of the day, is where the miss happens.

More about why I built BlurSnap →

If something here doesn’t match what you see on your machine — these apps do change — tell me and I will fix it: support@blursnap.app

Related, if you have a specific job in front of you: client names, bank statements, CVs, chats and inboxes.