Hide the serial number in a gun photo

Pick a photo, drag a box over what you want gone, export. The picture is decoded and re-encoded inside your browser. It is not uploaded, not stored, and not seen by us — because there is nothing here to receive it.

Choose a photo, or drop one here JPG, PNG, WebP or HEIC-decoded image. Stays on your device.

Exported image	—
Metadata (EXIF / GPS) in the export	—
Bytes scanned for metadata	—
Where the image was sent	nowhere — see below

What actually leaves your device

The photo: nothing. There is no upload field, no form, and no request that carries the image. You can confirm it yourself: open your browser's developer tools, go to the Network tab, and redact a photo. You will see the page load and nothing else — no request with your picture in it.

The visit: this page, like every other page on this site, is measured by Google Analytics. That counts a page view the way it does anywhere else on the web — it does not touch your photo, because your photo never reaches the network. If you would rather not be counted at all, your browser's tracking protection blocks it and the tool still works.

What this does NOT hide

A redaction tool that only tells you what it removed hands you false confidence. Marking a serial is the easy part. These are the things still in the frame afterwards:

The other markings. A serial is rarely the only identifier on a gun. Proof marks, an importer's stamp, a date code on the barrel, a rack number painted on the stock, a unit marking — each one narrows the gun down, and some are on the opposite side from the one you photographed.
The background. A workbench, a letter with your address, a prescription bottle, a pet, a window. This is where most accidental disclosure actually happens, and it has nothing to do with the gun.
Reflections. Polished bluing, a nickel finish, a scope lens and a glass tabletop will happily show your face, your phone, or the room you are standing in.
The gun's own wear. A distinctive scratch, a chip in the grip, an unusual patina, a repaired crack. To someone who has seen your gun before, that identifies it as reliably as a serial — and unlike a serial, nobody thinks to hide it.
Anything custom. Engraving, custom grips, an optic, a cerakote job, a muzzle device. Built-to-order work is often one of one.
The date-coded parts you were told to show. If you redact a serial but leave the two-digit year on the barrel, you have removed the unique number and kept the useful one — which is usually the correct trade, but be aware that is what you did.

Why pixelate rather than blur

A soft blur looks tidier and is a worse choice. Blur averages neighbouring pixels, so it attenuates the detail rather than removing it: every output pixel still carries a weighted sum of the original ones, and against short strings of large digits that is recoverable often enough to matter. Pixelation is a hard discard — each block is replaced by a single colour and the detail inside it is gone, not diluted.

That is why the default here is pixelation, and why the tool watches the size of the box you draw. A redaction is only as strong as its blocks. Draw a box barely larger than one block and the digits survive inside it; the page will tell you when that is about to happen rather than letting you export it quietly.

Why there is no upload button

We would like a library of photographs of every model — it is the obvious next thing this site is missing. Asking you to upload them here would mean this site starts holding pictures of firearms that strangers sent us, along with whatever is in the background, and it would make us responsible for what people upload. That is a different kind of site from the one this is, and it is not a decision to make by accident while adding a button.

So this page does one thing and does it in your browser. When we do ask for photographs, we will ask you to describe the provenance of each one, and we will label it the way every other source on this site is labelled.

Where to go next

Identifying a firearm you inherited or found — the procedure that gets you to a model and a date, and says plainly where it stops. The serial lookup — what the published charts do and do not support. Why two sources give two different years — the reason a date off a photo is a range more often than you would expect.