Photo Scrubber — local face blur & metadata removal

Simon Willison's Blog Tools
privacy face-blur image-processing webassembly mediapipe local-first metadata-removal

Summary

Simon Willison built Photo Scrubber, an experimental local tool that automatically detects and blurs faces in photos and strips metadata before sharing, using Google's MediaPipe compiled to WebAssembly and the BlazeFace detection model. It was created with the help of GPT-6 Astra and runs entirely in the browser for privacy-preserving image sharing.

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Cached at: 09/30/26, 04:13 PM

# Tool: Photo Scrubber — local face blur & metadata removal Source: [https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/29/photo-scrubber/](https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/29/photo-scrubber/) 29th September 2026 [Tool](https://simonwillison.net/elsewhere/tool/)[Photo Scrubber — local face blur & metadata removal](https://tools.simonwillison.net/photo-scrubber) I took a photograph of some protesters, then thought about how I don't like sharing photographs of strangers with identifiable faces\. I[had GPT\-6 Astra build](https://github.com/simonw/tools/commit/aa733ecc3458d5703e3b40c84507ae362f5fb294)this experimental tool that would identify faces and automatically blur them out\. It uses Google's[MediaPipe](https://developers.google.com/edge/mediapipe/solutions/guide)C\+\+ library, compiled to WebAssembly via[@mediapipe/tasks\-vision](https://www.npmjs.com/package/@mediapipe/tasks-vision), plus the[BlazeFace](https://sites.google.com/view/perception-cv4arvr/blazeface)face detection model\. Posted[29th September 2026](https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/29/)at 4:45 pm

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