In 2024, every "redact a PDF on Mac" tutorial ended the same way: open Preview, zoom in, drag a black rectangle. For images, the advice was even worse — paste into Pixelmator, use the brush tool, hope you got every email. Adobe Acrobat Pro had auto-detection, but it was Windows-first, Electron-based, $20/month, and your file went through their cloud.
I needed something else. I was sharing dozens of screenshots a week — terminal output, billing dashboards, support tickets — and every time I had to either hand-edit each one or post a slightly leaked version and hope nobody noticed. So I built the tool I wanted.
A native macOS app. On-device. Drag, detect, done.
The first version
The first version of BlurData did one thing: drop a PNG, get back a PNG with every email and URL blurred out. It used the macOS Vision framework for OCR and a handful of regex patterns. No cloud, no AI API, no account. Released as a paid Mac app in 2024 — the first one focused on automatic PII redaction native to macOS.
Then it grew
Users asked for names. So I added on-device natural language tagging — macOS already ships with NLTagger, why not use it. They asked for phone numbers, IPs, account numbers, license plates. Each one was a new detector. They asked for PDFs — so PDF support landed, with true redaction (text removed from the file structure, not a sticker on top). Then batch mode, custom regex patterns, custom redaction styles.
By the time the first competitors showed up, BlurData was already a mature product. Today, anyone searching "auto redact Mac" will find a half-dozen apps that look similar. Most launched 6–18 months after BlurData. Some are open source. Some have nicer onboarding. None of them existed when I shipped v1.
Why this matters
It matters because this is what indie Mac software looks like in 2026. A single person sees a problem, ships a tool, the market shows up, copies arrive. The original keeps shipping. The original keeps caring about every detail — the OCR accuracy on small fonts, the way Italian addresses match differently from US ones, whether the export keeps the PDF table of contents intact.
It also matters because privacy software should be made by people you can email. BlurData is one person. Your PDFs never leave your Mac because there is no server to send them to. There is no investor demanding telemetry. If you write to support, you get an answer from the person who wrote the code.
What's next
Screen recording redaction. More languages in the address and name detectors. A Mac Shortcuts action so you can wire BlurData into your own automations. Better defaults so you spend even less time clicking. And — always — keeping everything on your Mac, where it belongs.
If you've ever pasted a screenshot and immediately regretted it, BlurData is for you. Try it free for 7 days.
— iyia, maker of BlurData