Blur the faces you cannot publish.
Open a class photo or a whole sports day. Shadecote finds the faces and lists them beside the picture. You choose who stays out, and the finished file saves to the machine in front of you. The photograph itself never leaves your device.
Free to use today, with nothing to install.
A photo goes in, and a publishable photo comes out.
Four steps, in order. No setup and nothing to learn — pick it up and work through your photos.
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1.0
Open the photographs.
Drag in one class photo or a whole event. They open directly in your browser, so nothing installs and nobody has to ask IT. Add more part-way through and earlier work stays as it was.
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2.0
The faces are found and numbered.
The detector runs on the machine and lays out every face it finds in a review grid beside the photograph, so a small back-row face is shown at a size you can judge.
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3.0
Mark the ones who stay out.
Work down the grid with the consent register beside you. Click on a face to blur it, click again to put it back. If the detector missed someone, draw a rectangle or an ellipse over them and they get the same blur.
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4.0
Export, onto the machine you are sitting at.
One photo saves as
<name>-redacted.png. Two or more save as a single zip. Marking a photo reviewed records that you looked at it.
A soft blur, shaped to the head.
Shadecote blurs through a mask cut to the head and feathered at its edge. Black rectangles and pixel mosaics announce that something was hidden. A feathered blur leaves the photograph looking like a photograph, with one child in it who cannot be recognised.
There is no strength slider to get wrong. Every face gets the same soft blur, whether the tool found it or you marked it by hand, so a whole batch comes out looking like one set.
What it is, exactly.
For whoever has to sign this off — exactly what Shadecote does with your photos, in plain terms.
- Runs in
- The browser already on the machine. Nothing installs and no administrator is needed.
- Photographs uploaded
- None. Detection, masking, blurring and export run in the page. No photograph pixels are sent off the device.
- Photographs stored
- None. Close the tab and the session is gone. There is no history and no cache of the photographs, so there is nothing to purge later.
- Account
- There is a sign-in, a free 60-day trial and one yearly price for the whole school. Your photographs stay out of it.
- What gets sent to the server
- How many photographs you put through and how many faces you blurred in each. Those counts are your own usage record. The subscription is not metered on them, and the image itself is never part of it.
- Missed faces
- Drawn by hand as a rectangle or an ellipse, then treated exactly like a detected one.
- One photo out
<name>-redacted.png- Two or more out
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A single zip,
shadecote-redacted-<timestamp>.zip - Export size
- Up to 1280 px on the long edge, which suits a website, a newsletter or a social post.
One yearly price for the whole school.
Try it free for 60 days. After that, one subscription covers the whole school, however many photographs you put through. There is no monthly option and nothing is metered per photograph.
Full access for the whole 60 days. No card needed.
The whole school, unlimited photographs and up to five sign-ins. Billed once a year.
Up to five schools on one account, with central billing and a single invoice.
Prices exclude VAT.
What schools ask before trying Shadecote.
Do the photographs leave the computer?
No. Finding faces, cutting the masks, blurring and zipping all happen inside the page. The only thing that comes down the wire is the face models, once per session.
You said a subscription. What does the server see?
Your account, and counts: how many photographs went through and how many faces you blurred in each. Those counts are your own usage record, and the subscription is not metered on them. The server also checks whether a trial is still running. The photographs are not part of any of it. They stay on your machine, and the blurring happens there too.
What if it misses a face?
Sometimes it will. Small faces in a back row are the hard case. Draw over anyone it missed and they are blurred the same way. Noticing is still your job.
Can the blur be undone?
Not from the exported file. The blur is written into its pixels, and nothing saved with the file maps back to the original. Your original photograph is untouched, wherever it already was.
Where do the finished files go?
Wherever the browser puts downloads on that machine. Shadecote cannot put them anywhere else, because it has nowhere else to put them.
Does it work on a school laptop?
It is built for one: a managed Windows laptop or a Chromebook, with no graphics card assumed. Try it on the machine you will actually use before you plan around it.
What does it cost?
Nothing today. When the subscription opens, a school pays £120 a year excluding VAT, however many photographs it puts through, with a free 60-day trial first. Multi-academy trusts start at £500 a year. Nothing is metered per photograph, and the tool in front of you is free to use until then.
Try the whole process on a synthetic class photo first.
Nothing is decided until you export, and nothing is kept after you close the tab.