How to Blur Only Certain Faces in a Video

If you only need to blur some of the faces in a video — say, everyone except you — the trick is selective face blur: the app scans the whole clip, shows you every face it found, and you tap the ones you want hidden. Everyone else stays sharp. TrackBlur does this with on-device AI on iPhone and Android, completely offline, with no watermark on the export.

Here's the situation this solves.

The all-or-nothing problem

Say you filmed a street interview, or a vlog at a park, and there are five people in the shot. Your subject said yes to being on camera. The other four didn't — they just happened to walk by. With privacy laws like GDPR getting stricter and people generally caring more about where their face ends up, blurring bystanders has quietly become standard practice for creators.

The problem is that most editors give you two options: blur nobody, or drag a blur region around by hand, frame by frame, once per person. Three strangers in the shot means three separate manual tracking jobs. For one thirty-second clip. No thanks.

Selective face blur hands that work to the AI:

1. It scans the video and detects every unique face.
2. It groups each person's appearances across the whole clip — even if they leave the frame and come back.
3. You get a simple list of faces. Tap to blur, tap again to keep clear.

Watch it happen

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The steps

1. Open your video in TrackBlur and choose Selective Face Blur.
2. Wait for the scan. The on-device AI works through the clip and finds every distinct face in it.
3. Tap who to hide. You'll see the detected faces laid out — pick the ones to anonymize. The blur is applied to those people for the entire video, while your main subject stays untouched.
4. Pick a style. Regular blur, pixelation, or a solid box, with adjustable size and feathering.
5. Export. Straight to your camera roll, full quality, no watermark.

Want everyone hidden instead — a crowd, a school event, dashcam footage? Then blur all faces automatically is the faster mode for that.

Your footage never leaves your phone

Online face-blur tools ask you to upload the raw video to their servers first. That's slow with 4K footage, and it means the unblurred version of your video — the one you specifically wanted to protect people in — is now sitting on someone else's machine.

TrackBlur runs all of its face detection on the device itself. Nothing gets uploaded, ever. That's kind of the point.

Learn more

The full selective face blurring tutorial covers every option in the app.

More guides like this:

• How to blur all faces in a video automatically — when everyone should be anonymous.
• How to blur a moving object in a video — license plates, logos, screens, anything that isn't a face.