This iPhone shortcut blurs faces and strips metadata from photos
Jun 10, 2020
Dunja Đuđić
Dunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, concerts, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.
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Should you blur people’s faces when covering protests o should you not? This has been a heated debate lately, and opinions are largely different. But if you’re in the “blur the faces” team and you use an iPhone, now there’s a simple way to do it. A new shortcut lets you blur faces and strip all metadata from images in just one tap.
The shortcut is named “Blur Faces” and the man behind it is Noah Conk. It’s made for iPhones and it’s pretty simple to use. When you take a photo and apply “Blur Faces,” it will create a copy of the photo with blurred faces and all metadata stripped. Here is what it looks like:
I created an iOS shortcut for those who are out there protesting. This shortcut will blur faces and make a copy of the photo—which will have zero metadata
Feel free to donate: money is for server & software costs
Cashapp: $noahconkhttps://t.co/namAOuVJ40#BlackLivesMatter pic.twitter.com/QeaMsSco1Q
— Junggeun (@noahconk) June 3, 2020
You can access “Blur Faces” in three different ways: through Shortcuts app, Shortcuts widget panel, or Share menu. Here is how to install it:
- Go to Settings > Shortcuts
- Turn on “Allow Untrusted Shortcuts.”
- Tap “Allow” in the popup window.
- Enter your password when prompted.
- Back out of the Settings menu and then open this link in Safari.
- Tap “Add Untrusted Shortcut” to install the shortcut.
- Once the installation is done, open the shortcuts app.
- Tap the “Blur Faces” shortcut to run it for the first time, then grant it permissions to send data to a URL.
Whether or not we should blur faces when covering protests is debatable. Still, this app could be used for other purposes as well. It crossed my mind that it can be useful for sharing photos of kids, because some parents will only allow it if their children’s faces are blurred. But in whichever way you decide to use this shortcut, it should make it simple to blur faces and avoid any trouble that you otherwise might get into.
[via Lifehacker]
Dunja Đuđić
Dunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, concerts, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.
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2 responses to “This iPhone shortcut blurs faces and strips metadata from photos”
Apple now admitting that the young white privileged rioters are the only ones shelling out for luxury phones
zero metadata means zero copyright protection too. Personally for me if I need to pixelate a picture I take, then I question if I should be taking it in the first place. So I have no need for such an App. Then there is “allow untrusted shortcuts” and that tells me you may be hiding metadata but you could be giving other more important information to someone who should not have it.