How can I blur text in an image?

Solution 1:

GIMP (which is viewed by many as a replacement for Adobe's Photoshop) can do this, or if you need to automate this you could use ImageMagick (which, in addition to its assortment of excellent command-line tools, is supported by a variety of diverse and powerful languages such as Perl).

  GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program; free and open source)
  http://www.gimp.org/

  GIMP tutorial on how to do blurring
  http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Blur_Overlays/

  Image Magick (free and open source)
  http://www.imagemagick.org/

  Image Magick instructions for blurring
  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/331254/how-to-pixelate-blur-an-image-using-imagemagick

Solution 2:

Facepixelizer (Website): Free online web app for quickly blurring out text in an image. It has an "intelligent" text blurring tool that changes the amount of blurring based on the font size of the text being blurred.

Simply upload your image, select some text, then click blur.

GIMP (Windows, macOS, Linux): The built in "Smudge" tool can be used in a pinch for manually redacting text. The tool is a bit finicky, since there's no option to smudge an entire selection at once, but it should get the job done.

Skitch (macOS, iOS): One of the simplest offline solutions available. It's a simple annotation markup program with a built in Blur Tool. Just use the blur tool to select any area you want redacted.

_{Screenshot by Ian C.}

Solution 3:

1. If you don't need anything fancy like Photoshop or Gimp, try Picnik. Its got some pretty cool features and its fast, free and pretty easy to use for beginners.
2. If you need something offline Paint.Net looks pretty awesome to me.
3. I think Picasa has an option to blur images as well and is quite user friendly.
4. IrfanView is another one I have used for basic stuff.