If you’re about to post an image containing sensitive information on the internet, you need to make sure you don’t reveal anything too personal before sharing it to avoid potential repercussions.
On iPhone, the most common method is to scribble the sensitive text using the highlighter markup tool. It turns out, however, that this method isn’t fail-safe, and you can undo the scrawled text with a few simple edits to reveal what’s underneath.
Therefore, you must refrain from hiding personal information from your images by using the highlighter in the future. Follow us as we explain why using the highlighter isn’t a good idea and show you how to properly obfuscate information from images on an iPhone.
What’s wrong with using the highlighter to obfuscate information from pictures on iPhone?
The iPhone’s highlighter markup tool isn’t all bad. It’s just that the way it was used creates the potential for a reversal.
Most people try to hide text in their pictures by scribbling back and forth over it with a highlighter. While it seems to get the job done, the reality is far from it. We say this because several edit hacks have surfaced online recently showing how tweaking certain aspects of an edited image, such as brightness, contrast, exposure, etc., can reveal what’s underneath the doodle.
Discussing these tweaks is beyond the scope of this article, and we won’t do so to prevent their proliferation. Instead, we’ll show you how to properly hide personal information in your images.
How to properly hide personal information from pictures on iPhone
As mentioned above, it’s not a bad idea to use the highlighter to disguise personal information in your images. It can do the trick for you if you use it properly. Just make sure to add multiple layers above the text you want to obfuscate.
Also, make sure when adding these layers that you don’t swipe back and forth on the text, but swipe in a single stroke at a time and repeat this multiple times. This will add darker layers every time you swipe over the text, making it harder to undo. Likewise, you can also use multiple colors to highlight the text you want to hide.
Alternatively, if you still have doubts about the effectiveness of the highlighter, you can use other marking tools like a pen or pencil to scribble over the part of the image you want to hide. If you want to more easily yet effectively disguise information in your images, we recommend using the shape markup tool, as shown below:
- start the photos App on your iPhone.
- Open the picture with the sensitive information you want to hide.
- Beat those To edit button in the top right corner and tap the mark Button – one with the pencil icon.
- Click the plus sign (+) at the bottom and select a shape you want to use to cover the content you want to hide in the image.
- press the To fill (leftmost icon in the color selection grid) and select the first option. This will fill your shape with a solid color so that if you place it over something it will fade out.
- If you want to change the color of the shape, tap any color to see how it’s applied to your shape.
- Drag the shape over the text so that it completely covers it.
- When you are satisfied, press Finished to exit the marking screen.
- click Finished again to save the picture.
Hide sensitive information from your images before sharing them online
As you just saw, hiding sensitive information from your pictures on iPhone is not that complex. iOS’s markup tool in the Photos app makes it easy to hide sensitive information from images, so you don’t have to use third-party tools or websites to do the same thing, which would be quite tedious and risky.
With the steps above, you should now be able to properly use the highlighter to blur parts of the image you don’t want others to see. Or better yet, use the Shapes markup tool to make it more effective and efficient.
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