Simon Willison releases a local face-blurring tool
What happened
On 2026-09-30, Simon Willison released Photo Scrubber, an experimental tool that automatically detects and blurs faces while removing photo metadata. It is based on Google’s MediaPipe C++ library, compiled to WebAssembly through @mediapipe/tasks-vision, and uses the BlazeFace face detection model. All processing runs locally. Willison says it was built with GPT-6 Astra.
Written by AI from the reports · updated 23 h ago
Timeline
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- Simon WillisonPhoto Scrubber — local face blur & metadata removal
Simon Willison used GPT-6 Astra to build Photo Scrubber, an experimental tool that automatically detects and blurs faces. It is based on Google's MediaPipe C++ library, compiled to WebAssembly through @mediapipe/tasks-vision, and uses the BlazeFace face detection model. All processing runs locally.
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