Redact Screenshots and Text Before You Share. 100% On-Device.
Redact finds the emails, phone numbers, SSNs, credit cards, API keys and IP addresses hiding in your text and screenshots, then blacks them out before they leave your machine. No uploads. No account. No server ever sees your data.
The extension is in Chrome Web Store review now. The free tier ships inside the extension itself; Pro unlocks blur, on-device OCR, batch, and custom patterns.
What It Does
1Scrubs Text Automatically
Paste any text and Redact highlights every email, phone number, SSN, credit card, IP address, API key and UUID it finds. Real validators, not naive patterns: Luhn checks for cards, NANP rules for phones, entropy guards for keys. Redact with a black bar, a category label, or a hash, then copy the clean version.
2Blacks Out Screenshots
Drop in a screenshot, draw rectangles over anything sensitive, and export a clean PNG. Pro adds blur and pixelate styles, plus OCR that reads the image on your device and flags PII text for you automatically.
3Strips Hidden Metadata
Every exported image has its metadata removed: EXIF, timestamps, and embedded text chunks that can leak where and when a screenshot was taken. This happens on every export, free tier included.
The Privacy Promise
Your files never leave your device. All detection, redaction, OCR, and metadata stripping run locally in your browser. The OCR engine (Tesseract) is bundled with the extension, so even image text recognition makes zero network calls. The one and only network request in the entire app is a license verification to Gumroad when you activate a Pro key, and that result is cached so everything works offline afterward. No analytics, no telemetry, no account.
How to Redact a Screenshot Without Uploading It Anywhere
- Open Redact and switch to the Image tab. The editor opens locally in your browser. Nothing you load into it is transmitted.
- Drop in your screenshot. Draw rectangles over anything sensitive. With Pro, click OCR auto-detect and Redact reads the image on your device and flags emails, keys, and numbers for you.
- Pick a style and export. Solid black bars on the free tier; blur and pixelate with Pro. The exported PNG has all metadata stripped automatically. Share it anywhere.
For text, it is even faster: paste, review the highlighted matches, toggle any category off, click Redact, copy. The full walkthrough, including where upload-based tools fall short, is in the how-to post.
Pricing, Honestly
| Feature | Free | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Text redactor, all PII categories, all three styles | Yes | Yes |
| Manual image redaction, black-bar style | Yes | Yes |
| Metadata stripped on every export | Yes | Yes |
| Works offline | Yes | Yes |
| Blur and pixelate styles | No | Yes |
| OCR auto-detect (on-device) | No | Yes |
| Batch image processing | No | Yes |
| Custom regex patterns | No | Yes |
Pro is $12, one time. No subscription, no account, lifetime access. Compare that with Adobe Acrobat Pro at $19.99 per month just to get redaction, or upload-based redaction services from $29 per month.