Snipping Tool Has No Blur — Here’s What to Use Instead

Is there a blur function in the Snipping Tool?

No. There is no way to blur a line of text, no way to soften one area of the image, and no pixelate or mosaic either — the tool has a pen, a highlighter, shapes, an eraser, a crop, and the text tools behind the Scan Text button. Nothing in that list softens anything, and no newer build adds it. (Nor did Snip & Sketch, the older name for the same app, despite people asking for a blur tool since those days.)

What it does have is three ways to cover something. Quick Redact, under Scan Text, blacks out email addresses and phone numbers in one click — those two, and nothing else. Any other readable text you can select and Redact by hand. And for what isn’t text at all — a face, an avatar, a logo, a label inside a chart — a rectangle from Shapes with the fill opacity turned up will do it. All three produce the same result: a solid block.

So the real question is whether a solid block will do

Often it will, and then you are finished without installing anything.

The first row is the one worth knowing about, because it is the reason security writeups tell people to stop blurring things altogether. A blur is a filter applied to the original pixels. When the hidden thing is short and its possible values are countable — a four-digit code, a date, a small sum — someone can render each candidate, blur it the same way and compare. That has been demonstrated against real tools. For a card number, the black bar is not a compromise, it is the correct answer.

The third row is why you went looking for a blur in the first place, and it is not a matter of taste. A screenshot is worth sending because it still looks like the thing it came from — the layout, the columns, the shape of the conversation. Cover a dozen items with black bars and that is gone: what arrives is a redacted document, which reads as either alarming or unusable, and the recipient now has to ask you what they are looking at. A veil keeps the page legible while the words in it are gone. For a name, an address or a paragraph there is also no short list of candidates for anyone to compare against.

Windows has no blur anywhere, with one asterisk

Paint has no blur either. The only blur that ships with Windows is in the Photos app, and it is a background blur: built to find a person in a photograph and soften what is behind them. There is a brush for correcting its guess, so you can technically push the mask onto a block of text — but that means arguing with an automatic selection, using a soft round brush, in a second app, on an already-saved file, for every screenshot you take. It exists. It is not an answer to this.

What is an answer

Something made for screenshots rather than photographs. There are plenty of those, free and paid, and any of them with a blur brush will cover the job.

But every one of them shares a habit with the two Windows routes above — with Quick Redact, with the rectangle you draw by hand, with the Photos brush: each asks you to name the things to hide, one at a time. That works for as long as you can list them. On a screenshot of a screen you will remember the customer’s name, because you were looking straight at it — and not the other browser tab titles, the bookmarks bar, the name in the account bubble in the corner, or the notification that arrived while you were dragging the selection. Nothing warns you. The picture looks finished either way.

So BlurSnap opens the capture with everything already hidden, and you brush over the part you meant to show. There is no missed item, because you were never covering items. It also has a frosted glass mode, which replaces the hidden area with a plain sheet instead of a blurred copy — the same look, with nothing in the file derived from what it covers. It is $9.99 in the Microsoft Store with a 15-day trial, and if your job is on the first two rows of the table above, you do not need it.

Why I built this

My own version of this started exactly where yours did: looking for a button that wasn’t there. Down the toolbar twice, decide you must be blind, check whether the app needs updating, give up and crop instead — which throws away the context that made the screenshot worth sending.

You only go looking once or twice before you stop expecting it. What stays is the cropping — throwing away the part that gave the screenshot its meaning, every single time, because the only alternative on offer was to black out eleven things by hand and hope you didn’t miss the twelfth. Not that hiding things is hard. It is that you are asked to do it backwards.

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.