There’s a particular anxiety that comes with wanting to share a photo or video from a public event like a wedding, a street celebration, or even a protest, when not everyone in the frame consented to being posted online. Most people either abandon the idea entirely or spend an embarrassing amount of time poking at blurred stickers in their phone’s default editor. Neither option feels right.
While there are easy ways to blur or hide sensitive parts of a photo right from your device, doing it manually for a crowd is tedious. That’s what made me curious about PutMask, a free Android app by ClipCensor that promises to automate the whole thing. After loading a group wedding photo and watching it detect and mask eleven faces in under a second, I was convinced. This app makes it easier to be thoughtful about other people’s privacy.
OS
Android
Price model
Free (paid-plan available)
Blur or mask faces and sensitive details with PutMask. Protect privacy in photos and videos using quick, easy editing tools.
PutMask detects faces and license plates automatically
Point it at a crowd and watch it do the blurring
The first time you launch PutMask, it asks for permission to access your photos and videos; nothing unusual there, though it’s always a good idea to keep up with which apps have photo access on your device. After that, you land on a clean, almost minimalist home screen with two straightforward options. One is Mask Media, where you pick something from your gallery. The other is Your Previous Projects, which holds anything you’ve worked on before.
Tap Select From Gallery, choose whether you’re working with a video or an image, and then pick the file you want. From there, PutMask runs its AI face detection across the entire frame. Within a moment, every detected face gets outlined with a numbered green box right on the image.
In my test with a busy group photo (eleven people standing in a line, some partially obscured, some at slight angles), the app flagged all twelve detectable faces in moments, each one neatly boxed and numbered in the editor. That’s not a small thing. Many competing apps stumble on partially turned heads or smaller faces pushed to the edges of a frame. PutMask’s detection engine can identify faces as small as 10×10 pixels from virtually any angle, which shows clearly in real-world use.
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All the detected faces appear as thumbnails along the bottom of the editor, and they’re selected by default. If there’s someone you want to keep visible, maybe the couple at the center of a wedding photo, you just tap their thumbnail to remove the mask. Everyone else stays censored. The interaction is straightforward and approachable, turning what could be a fiddly editing task into what I can call almost effortless.
For anything the AI misses, or for non-face elements you want to obscure, the Pencil tool lets you draw a freehand censor region over any area with your finger. This is especially useful when you need to hide sensitive info before sharing a photo, such as visible tattoos, text on signs, or branded items you’d rather not feature in a post. The Objects tab also lets you manually place and resize rectangular or elliptical censor boxes anywhere on the frame. In video clips, you can drag those boxes across frames so they follow moving subjects, keeping them covered even when the AI doesn’t catch every moment.
There’s also a dedicated detection layer for license plates. Inside the Settings screen, you’ll find a full License Plate Detection section with adjustable sensitivity and offset controls. It’s a thoughtful addition, especially if you’re posting street footage or documenting an incident and want to avoid accidentally exposing someone’s vehicle information.
Six different censor styles and a detailed settings panel to make the final result polished
More options than you’ll probably ever need — in a good way
PutMask doesn’t box you into one generic pixelation style. When you tap the Color button for any selected object in the editor, a scrollable menu opens with six different filter options. You’ll find Mosaic Effect, Gaussian Blur, Median Blur, Random Colors, Black and White, and Custom Color. Mosaic gives you that classic chunky-pixel look people associate with censored TV footage. Gaussian Blur produces a softer, more graceful smear that tends to blend more gracefully into a photograph. Median Blur sits somewhere between the two. Random Colors and Black and White lean more stylized, which can be useful if you want the censor effect to feel intentional instead of something hastily slapped on top.
Inside the Settings panel, there’s a Filters section where you can choose a default style so you don’t have to pick the same option every time you start a new project. You can also adjust the Default Pixel Rate, which controls how coarse or fine the mosaic effect appears, and choose whether censor shapes default to rectangles or ellipses. Ellipses tend to follow the natural shape of a face, while rectangles make more sense for license plates or blocks of text.
The Face Detection settings give you a bit more control over how the AI behaves. You can switch sensitivity to Low, Medium, or High, and tweak the Width Offset and Height Offset sliders to expand or shrink the masked area around each face. If the mask clips someone’s forehead or leaves their chin exposed, a quick nudge of those sliders usually fixes it. There’s even an option to load a test image right inside the settings screen so you can preview how your adjustments behave before touching your actual photo or video. It’s a small detail, but it saves a great deal of trial and error.
Video editing gets its own helpful features as well. With Key Frame editing, you can adjust the position and size of a censor box between two points on the timeline, letting it follow someone walking across the frame without you having to reposition it on every single frame. Processing runs forward and backward simultaneously at up to 300 frames per second, so even longer clips don’t turn into a long wait. The app also saves your work as a project you can reopen later, which is a welcome touch if you’re working through a more involved edit.
This is the app your camera roll has been waiting for
One detail I can’t leave out is that all processing happens locally on your device. Your photos and videos never leave the phone, never get uploaded to a server somewhere, and never pass through someone else’s infrastructure. For an app built around protecting people’s identities, that local-first approach is really the whole point.
The free version does come with a few limitations. Exported videos are watermarked with the “PutMask” logo and capped at 540p resolution. High frame rate footage, anything recorded above 30fps, is also a premium-only feature; if you try to load a 60fps or 120fps clip, the app will prompt you to either convert it to a standard frame rate first (which it can do in-app) or upgrade to a paid “Privacy Saver” subscription. A one-time upgrade removes the watermark, unlocks HD export, and lifts the video length limit. For images, which is what you see in the screenshots I shared earlier, the watermark is present but fairly discreet, and the quality of the output is perfectly usable.
Whether that trade-off feels acceptable depends on what you’re creating. But for most casual situations, the free version does the job without much fuss.
