Blur faces and strip metadata locally in your browser — built with GPT-6 Astra
Photo Scrubber blurs faces and removes metadata from your photos — with everything happening locally in the browser, so your photo never leaves your machine. "I had GPT-6 Astra build this experimental tool that would identify faces and automatically blur them out," wrote Simon Willison, and the colophon marks it "photo-scrubber code / AI generated".
Under the hood it runs Google MediaPipe (BlazeFace) compiled to WebAssembly for face detection, with adjustable blur strength, face-box padding, and manual redaction regions. The "Save a clean copy" step rebuilds the image from pixels so metadata containers are removed before download. Built September 29, 2026 — another of Willison's prompt-driven tools, and a genuinely useful privacy utility.