Manual redaction lets you choose precisely which areas of a photograph should be concealed. It is available in PhotoSanitize Standard, Pro, and Enterprise and does not require automatic visual detection.
You can use manual redaction to hide a person’s name on a badge, an address on a parcel, a document on a desk, or any other visible content that should not appear in the shared image.
Creating a manual redaction
- Add and analyze the photograph.
- Highlight it in the Photo Queue and open Visual Privacy.
- Choose Add Manual Redaction.
- Draw a rectangle around the information you want to conceal.
- Review the region’s position and size, adjusting it if necessary.
You can add several manual redactions to one photograph. For instance, a property photograph might require separate regions over a framed family picture, a document on a table, and a vehicle license plate visible through a window.
Adding these regions does not modify the source image. They remain selections until you run sanitization.
Choosing the correct boundaries
A redaction should fully cover the information you want removed. When concealing text, include every character and enough surrounding area to ensure that no meaningful portion remains visible. For faces or identifying marks, inspect the region at a sufficiently high zoom level to confirm that the intended details are covered.
An overly small rectangle may leave identifying fragments visible. An unnecessarily large one may obscure useful context. You can adjust the selected region before applying it, so take advantage of the preview rather than accepting the first rectangle you draw.
When information appears in a reflection or at an unusual angle, a rectangular selection may need to cover more surrounding space than expected.
Managing the redaction list
Manual redactions appear among the Visual Privacy findings. Each has a checkbox indicating whether it is selected for application to the output.
You can deselect a region if you decide it should remain visible. If you no longer need a manual region, select it and choose Remove Manual Redaction.
Select All and Deselect All can change the inclusion state of the redaction findings, but they do not select or deselect files in the Photo Queue.
Take care to distinguish these two levels of selection. The queue determines which images are processed, while the Visual Privacy findings determine which parts of the current image are concealed.
Applying the redactions
When you are satisfied with the selection, complete any required visual review and run Sanitize Selected.
PhotoSanitize replaces the selected pixels with solid, opaque black content in the sanitized file. The information is not retained beneath a removable overlay or annotation.
Because redaction is permanent in the output, changing it afterward requires returning to the original photograph and creating another sanitized version.
Inspecting the finished image
Open the sanitized file and examine every redacted area. Check that the information is completely concealed, that no unintended details remain visible, and that surrounding content has not been unnecessarily obscured.
For business use, this final check should reflect the intended recipient. An image that is appropriate for an internal project team may need additional redaction before being placed on a public website.
Manual redaction gives you direct control over what is hidden, but its effectiveness depends on selecting all the relevant regions before sanitization.