BlurData - Auto-blur for Mac

BlurData scans content and flags emails, names, addresses, IP addresses, URLs, monetary amounts, account numbers and license plates on its own. You don't select anything by hand. If the built-in detectors miss something, you can add a custom regex pattern for internal IDs, API keys, JWTs or ticket numbers, so the same rules apply to every document.

Four redaction styles cover different situations. Blur and Pixelate keep the layout readable while hiding the value. Black Box and Black Text wipe the data from the file structure entirely, which is the right choice for anything you publish. The exported file carries no hidden layer with the original content sitting underneath.

A newer mode replaces each person, amount and address with a consistent label like [PERSON_1] instead of a black box. The same person keeps the same label on every page, so you can hand the copy to ChatGPT or Claude and still get a useful answer. The mapping key stays on your Mac, and it only exists if you choose to export it.

Every step runs locally: detection, OCR, redaction and export. Nothing is uploaded, and no internet connection is needed. This is what makes it workable for regulated data, since there's no third-party server in the path and no data processing agreement to sign.

Most tools pick one format. BlurData covers screenshots, images and multi-page PDFs in the same app. Scanned pages go through on-device OCR, so photographed documents and screen grabs are treated the same as text-based PDFs. This is the gap that lets it blur screenshots and redact PDFs on Mac from a single window, instead of you juggling two apps.

Drop a folder and BlurData runs the whole set in one pass, writing clean copies to the destination you choose. Sensitive text is permanently anonymized and removed from the file structure, not just covered by a rectangle you could peel back later.