Pixelate Image

Pixelate image files in two ways on this page. Whole picture (pixel art) turns your photo or drawing into a grid of flat squares, with as many or as few colours as you like. Only parts (hide faces, text) keeps the picture as it is and turns just the areas you mark into large blocks, so a face, a name or a number plate can no longer be recognised.

Everything is worked out by your own browser. The picture is opened, changed and saved on your device and is never sent to a server. There is no AI involved: every square is simple arithmetic on the pixels underneath it, so the result is predictable and the same every time. JPG, PNG, WebP and GIF pictures work, and most browsers open other common image types too.

Pixel art is a picture made of visible square cells, each one a single flat colour. The look comes from old computer and console games, where screens had very few pixels and every one of them mattered. Today people use it for avatars, game sprites, stickers, icons, posters and craft patterns.

If you want to pixelate image to pixel art, choose Whole picture (pixel art) at the top of the tool. The picture is divided into a grid, and each cell takes the true average colour of the area it covers. The tool shrinks the picture in halves before the last step, so every cell really reflects all the pixels underneath it, not just one sample from the middle. That keeps thin lines and small details from flickering in and out.

Below the preview you see the size of the grid and the number of colours, for example 64 × 48 cells · 16 colours. The height of the grid always follows the shape of your picture, so nothing is stretched. A picture that is twice as wide as it is tall gives a grid that is twice as wide as it is tall.

The best source pictures have a clear subject, good contrast and a simple background. A face filling the frame, a pet against a plain wall, a logo or a cartoon character all work well. A busy landscape at a small grid size can turn into noise, because each cell has to stand for a big mixed area. Crop Image first if the subject is small in the frame, and Remove Background if a cluttered background distracts from it.

Pixel size decides how coarse or fine the result is, and you can set it in two ways. Grid width counts cells across the picture. Tap 16, 32, 48, 64, 100 or 128, or use the slider for any width from 8 to 300 cells. Fewer cells give big chunky squares; more cells keep more detail. Grid width is the right choice when you need a known number of cells, for example a 50-cell-wide stitch chart or a 32-pixel game sprite.

Block size sets how many original pixels go into one square, from 2 to 80 px. Blocks of 12 px on a picture 1,200 px wide give a grid of 100 cells. Block size is handy when you want the same look on several pictures of the same size, or when you think in terms of how big the squares should be on the original photo.

As a rough guide, 16 to 32 cells across gives a bold, iconic look that reads well even as a tiny avatar. Around 48 to 64 cells keeps faces recognisable while still looking clearly pixelated. Above 100 cells the picture starts to look like a photo again, which suits large craft projects or posters made of many small squares.

Many games, emoji sets and pixel art challenges use fixed sizes such as 16 × 16, 32 × 32 or 64 × 64 pixels. To pixelate image to 32x32 for a square picture, choose Grid width, tap 32 and tick Save at the exact grid size (e.g. 32 × 32 px). The PNG you download then has exactly one image pixel per cell, so a 32-cell-wide grid becomes a file 32 pixels wide.

The height still follows your picture. A square picture gives 32 × 32; a 4:3 picture gives 32 × 24. If you need a square file from a picture that is not square, crop it to a square first with Crop Image and then come back. That way you choose which part is kept, rather than having the picture squashed.

Without the exact option, each cell is drawn larger in the download, as set by Each pixel as N × N px. The slider goes from 1 to 40 px per cell, and 10 is the default. A 32-cell grid at 10 px per cell is saved as a 320-pixel-wide picture with crisp edges, which is easier to view and share than a tiny file. Programs and websites often blur tiny pictures when they enlarge them, so a bigger saved cell size keeps the hard edges sharp everywhere.

The exact size is perfect for game engines, sprite sheets and pixel editors, which work best with one pixel per cell. You can always make it bigger later; a larger version made here is better than enlarging a tiny file elsewhere, because the edges stay perfectly square.

Real pixel art rarely uses thousands of colours. A limited palette makes the result look cleaner and is essential for charts and bead or thread counts. To pixelate image with color palette settings, open the Colours card and pick one of the options. All colours keeps every averaged colour exactly as it is, which gives the most natural result but can contain hundreds of slightly different shades.

Limited (choose how many) builds a palette from your own picture with the median cut method. You set the number of colours from 2 to 64, and the tool finds the colours that represent the picture best. 8 to 16 colours give a classic look; 24 to 32 keep skin tones and soft shading; 4 or 5 give a bold poster style.

Black and white maps every cell to pure black or pure white, which suits stencils, simple embroidery and high-contrast logos. 4 grays and 8 grays give a soft monochrome look with even steps from black to white. Green 4-tone (retro handheld) uses four shades of green inspired by early handheld game consoles. Retro 16 colours is a fixed set of 16 bright, saturated colours in the style of retro fantasy game consoles.

My own colours (HEX) lets you type your own list of colour codes, separated by commas or spaces, such as #000000, #ffffff, #ff004d, #29adff. Each code needs six hex digits. Every cell is then mapped to the nearest colour in your list. This is how you match the colours you actually own: look up the hex codes of your threads, beads or paints and type them in. The Color Picker tool helps you read a hex code from any picture, and the Color Palette Generator suggests sets that go well together.

When you pick any palette other than All colours, a Dithering (smoother shading) checkbox appears. Without dithering, every cell simply becomes the nearest palette colour. That gives clean, flat areas, which is what most pixel art and almost all craft patterns want.

With dithering on, the small error of each cell is passed on to its neighbours using the Floyd–Steinberg method. The result mixes palette colours in fine patterns, so smooth gradients such as a sky or a cheek look softer even with few colours. It is a classic trick from old games and printed newspapers.

For craft work, leave dithering off. Dithered areas contain many single scattered cells, which are slow to stitch or place and look busy up close. For screen pixel art with very few colours, such as Black and white or Green 4-tone (retro handheld), dithering often looks great.

To pixelate image with grid lines on top, tick Grid lines in the Output card and choose a line colour with the small colour box next to it. A light gray is the default. Every 10th line is drawn stronger than the others, just like on graph paper, so you can count rows and columns quickly when you copy the picture by hand.

Grid lines are drawn when each cell is at least 3 px, so raise Each pixel as N × N px if they do not show. For printing a chart, 15 to 25 px per cell gives lines that are easy to see and cells big enough to colour in or mark off.

Symbols (pattern chart) adds a small symbol in the middle of each cell, one symbol per palette colour. It needs a limited palette, so pick one under Colours first; the checkbox stays greyed out while All colours is selected. Symbols are drawn when cells are at least 8 px, in black on light colours and in white on dark ones, so they stay readable. There are 28 different symbols. With more than 28 colours some symbols repeat, so keep the palette at 28 colours or fewer for a chart you will follow by symbol.

Cross stitch patterns are grids where every square is one stitch of one colour. That makes pixel art and cross stitch a natural match. To pixelate image for cross stitch, set Grid width to the number of stitches you want across, pick Limited (choose how many) with a sensible number of colours, leave dithering off and download the pattern chart.

To choose the grid width, think about your fabric. On 14-count Aida there are 14 stitches per inch, so a 70-stitch-wide design is 5 inches wide. On 18-count it is about 3.9 inches. A width of 60 to 120 stitches suits most portraits and pets; very small designs of 30 to 50 stitches suit cards and bookmarks.

The pattern chart PNG always has grid lines, stronger every 10th line, and a symbol in every cell, with cells of at least 20 px. Under the chart is a legend with the symbol, the hex colour and the number of stitches for each colour. The Colour counts (CSV) file gives the same list as a spreadsheet, with symbol, hex, RGB and count columns.

The tool does not include branded thread charts. It gives hex colours and counts, so you match them to your own threads. A simple way is to type the hex codes of the threads you have into My own colours (HEX); the chart then uses only those colours and the counts tell you how much of each you need. Between 10 and 25 colours is a comfortable range for most stitched portraits.

Fuse beads are small plastic tubes placed on a pegboard and ironed together. Each bead is one cell, so a bead design is pixel art too. Many people search to pixelate image for perler beads, and this page works for any brand of fuse beads, mini beads or similar craft beads. It is not connected to any bead brand and does not include official bead palettes.

Common square pegboards have 29 × 29 pegs, and large ones have more. Set Grid width to the number of pegs across, or a multiple of it if you join several boards. A 29-cell design fits one standard board; 58 cells fills two boards side by side.

Pick Limited (choose how many) with a small number of colours, often 6 to 16, and leave dithering off so each colour forms solid areas. Better still, type the hex codes of the bead colours you own into My own colours (HEX). Download the pattern chart to follow on screen or on paper, and the Colour counts (CSV) file to see how many beads of each colour you need before you start. After saving the CSV, the tool shows the total number of colours and stitches / beads.

Bead designs read best with a clear outline. If your subject melts into the background, remove the background first and use one strong colour around the edge.

Sometimes you do not want pixel art at all; you just want to hide something. Choose Only parts (hide faces, text). The full picture stays sharp, and only the areas you mark are turned into large blocks. To pixelate image online brush style, pick Brush in the Mark areas card, set the brush size from 10 to 160 px and paint over the face, name, address or number plate.

Box is quicker for straight-edged things such as text, screens, documents and licence plates. Pick Box and drag a rectangle over the area; drag again for each extra area. Brush and box marks can be mixed on the same picture.

Pixel size sets how big the blocks are, from 4 to 60. It is scaled to the picture, so the same setting looks the same on a small phone photo and on a large camera file; 14 means blocks of about 14 px on a picture 1,000 px on its long side. Undo removes the last mark and Clear marks removes them all. The info line under the preview tells you how many marks you have made.

Download picture saves a PNG at the full size of your original, with only the marked areas changed. The button stays disabled until you have marked at least one area, so you cannot accidentally save an unchanged picture.

Pixelation is a good way to hide details, but only when the blocks are large. Small blocks can sometimes be reversed, or read again, especially on text and number plates, because each block still carries an average of the letters underneath. Someone who guesses the font and size can compare possible words with your blocks.

So for privacy, use large pixels. A good rule is that each block should be bigger than the thing you want to hide: bigger than one letter for text, and so big that a face shows only a few blocks across. Mark a little beyond the edges of the area as well. If anything is still recognisable at a glance, raise Pixel size and mark it again.

For a softer look, the Blur Image tool blurs areas instead of turning them into blocks. Strong blur and large pixels both hide details; tiny blur and tiny pixels both leave clues. Photos can also contain hidden location and camera data, so Remove Metadata is worth a quick visit before you share something sensitive.

Pixelation, blur and a solid box all hide parts of a picture, and each has its place. Large pixel blocks make it obvious that something was hidden on purpose, while the colours and rough shapes around them still fit the photo. That is why they are common for faces in news pictures and for number plates in street photos.

A blur looks softer and more natural, which suits backgrounds, passers-by and screenshots where you want attention on something else. A solid box of one colour hides everything completely and is the safest choice for passwords, card numbers and ID numbers, because nothing of the original is left at all.

Whichever you choose, make the change in the picture itself and save a new file. Covering something with a shape in a document or slide often leaves the original underneath, where it can be uncovered again. The PNG saved here contains only the changed pixels.

This tool is free with no sign-up, no watermark and no limit on how many pictures you make. When people look to pixelate image online free, they usually also want to avoid uploading private photos, and here nothing is uploaded at all: the work is done by your browser, so there is no server cost to pass on.

You work on one picture at a time. Tap Other picture under the preview to open the next one; your settings stay the same, which makes it quick to give a series of pictures the same look.

To pixelate image free on a phone or computer, you only need a current browser. On iPhone and iPad, open this page in Safari or another browser, tap Select a picture and choose a photo from your library or take one. The downloaded PNG goes to Downloads in the Files app, and you can save it to Photos from there.

On Android, tap Select a picture and pick from your gallery or files. Downloads usually land in the Downloads folder and show up in your gallery app. On Windows and Mac, drag a file from a folder onto the box, or copy a picture and press Ctrl+V or Cmd+V on the page.

On a phone, the brush works with your finger: the picture does not scroll while you paint over it, so marks land where you touch. Box mode works the same way with a drag. On a small screen, zoom the page out a little to see the whole picture and the settings together.

Start with fewer cells than you think. Pixel art looks best when each square has a job, and a smaller grid often makes a stronger, more recognisable picture. Try 32, then 48, then 64 and keep the one you like.

Increase contrast before you begin if the photo is flat or dull. Strong lights and darks survive the averaging much better than soft middle tones. A plain background helps even more, because the cells around the subject stay calm.

For craft projects, fewer colours mean less shopping and simpler work. Look at the colour chips under the buttons: if a colour is used only a handful of times, lower the number of colours and see whether the picture still holds up.

When you hide something, check the result at full size before you share it. Zoom in on the saved file and make sure no letter, eye or digit can be made out.

Some websites use AI to redraw a photo as pixel art. This tool does not. To pixelate image no AI is needed: each cell is the average of the pixels it covers, and each palette colour is found by straightforward maths. Nothing is invented, no faces are changed, and the same settings always give the same result.

That makes the output honest and repeatable. A chart made today will match one made next week from the same picture, which matters when you plan a craft project or a series of game sprites. It also means your pictures never leave your device.

In Whole picture mode, the tool works out the grid size from Grid width or Block size, shrinks the picture step by step to that grid so each cell is the average of its area, then maps each cell to a palette colour if you chose one. The small grid is finally drawn large with smoothing turned off, which is why the squares stay perfectly sharp.

In Only parts mode, the tool makes a coarse copy of the whole picture at the chosen pixel size and draws it back only inside the areas you marked. Outside those areas the original pixels are untouched. All of this happens in a canvas inside your browser tab.

Pixel art and pixelated pictures often go on to other jobs. Resize Image changes the size of the whole file, Add Text to Image puts a title or caption on a poster, and JPG to GIF can turn a series of frames into a small animation. PNG to ICO turns a small square sprite into a Windows icon, and the Favicon Generator makes website icons in all the usual sizes.

For printing a pattern chart together with notes, Image to PDF puts one or more pictures into a single PDF. For a soft gray look instead of blocks, Grayscale Image converts a photo to shades of gray at full resolution. If the picture is too small to start with, Upscale Image can make it larger before you pixelate it.