A quick and secure way to censor private info!
Obfuscate lets you redact your private information from any image.
Download Install Obfuscate on Linux | Flathub
Great review of the app by IT’S FOSS.
I like how it shows a warning popup when you use “Blur” redaction mode:
Which is important as discussed here.
EDIT: Obfuscate doesn’t remove EXIF tags btw, so make sure to also remove remove them after redacting by using Metadata Cleaner or Exiftool/MAT2 CLI if you prefer.
Someone in IT’S FOSS article commented with
Kinda redundant with the Annotation tools on KDE that’s accessible directly from Gwenview and Spectacle
Does GNOME and XFCE have the same software or similar tools by default?
It isn’t recommended to blur text, yet this is precisely what is being done here.
There are 2 modes, Fill and Blur
Fill, basically adds a black box/bar on the text/part you want to redact.
I mean their logo is literally a credit card blurred- it’s insecure.
Are we reading the same article? From the article:
As you can see, the Blur method doesn’t really hide the contents all that well, and people with the correct tools can recover the text. So, don’t use that redaction mode for highly sensitive stuff.
Don’t most Linux distro’s have this backed in in the PDF viewer?
I’ve tested this tool after I moved to Fedora Silverblue recently. I was looking for a basic image editor that can be used for redaction functionality which isn’t Gwenview (since the Flatpak looks horrible on GNOME).
I appreciate the tool’s simplicity, and as discussed in the OP, the clear warning it shows about the limitations of the blur feature.
Notably, in contrast to Gwenview—which asks for filesystem=host and PulseAudio permissions—Obfuscate doesn’t ask for any sensitive permissions other than IPC + X11, which can be disabled without affecting the functionality of the app.
GNOME’S PDF viewer (Evince) doesn’t have redaction capabilities (it doesn’t support opening popular image formats anyway).
The default image viewer (Loupe) also doesn’t have redaction capabilities, sadly.
