Obfuscate For Linux

Nowadays, the top tier photo editing apps make it so that it really seems that there's no limits to what you can or can't do.

While full-featured, advanced photo editors usually provide everything you might need for enhancing your photos, they're can be a bit too complex for the average, day-to-day user.

Most advanced photo editors are also very good when it comes to helping you protect or maintain your privacy by allowing you to add blur effects selectively (make specific areas blurry while still retaining the sharpness of the overall photo).

Obfuscate is one photo editor that's designed for this particular task. It's a lightweight, no-frills, Linux photo editor that allows you to blur faces, number plates, name tags, signs, or sensitive personal information.

The main advantage of Obfuscate is that it's dead-simple to use. You just load the photo, select one of the two tools available (either a blur tool or a "paint-over" tool), and that's that.

Its minimal feature-set coupled with the fact that it also allows you to load photos effortlessly and quickly from either the clipboard or via drag and drop actions make it really fast.

The GUI is pretty much stripped down of other elements usually associated with photo editing apps. You get a simple top toolbar with controls for Undo, Redo, a tool selector, and a main menu.

From the main menu, you can also select the zoom level, or see the full list of keyboard shortcuts.

By now, it should be quite clear what Obfuscate is and isn't. The fact that it has such a small feature set is indeed good for new users and for speed, but we would have liked the app a bit more if it would at least allow you to choose the strength of the effects.

Nevertheless, Obfuscate is a nice, little photo editing tool that definitely provides a super-fast way of hiding private information from any image.