Everything I film, everything I shoot, anonymised on my own machine

Hi everyone,

A while back I filmed an interview with someone who agreed to talk on one condition: nobody could recognise them. I had to stay visible in the same shot, it was my interview.
Simple request.
I couldn't find a single tool that did it without a fight.

That wasn't new. I'd been juggling apps for a while: one for faces in video, another for photos, nothing decent for a whole folder.
And every good tool ran through the cloud. To blur someone's face, I first had to upload their video, unprotected, to servers I didn't know, in a country I didn't choose, for a length of time nobody told me.

Those rushes had children in them, a witness who had trusted me, people who never asked to be there. The only way to protect them was to hand them over to a stranger.

So I built HideLens Studio.

It blurs faces automatically, in a video, a photo, or an entire folder at once. You choose who disappears and who stays, in the same shot. It does it live on your webcam in Zoom, Meet and OBS, and it can stream a recorded video as if it were your webcam.

All of it runs on your Mac. No server, no account, no upload. Unplug the Wi-Fi and it still works. macOS only for now, and the webcam stream needs the virtual camera that ships with the app one checkbox.

I didn't want to stop at blurring. Once your footage is anonymised you finish it in the same place: automatic subtitles, silence cutting, 9:16 reframe, transitions. I spent a lot of time making it something you can actually work in rather than a one-trick utility. It's not perfect — I already know what's going into the next versions.

€9.99 once. No subscription, no upgrade path, no "pro" tier. For the first 100 people here, use the code EARLYADOPTERS at checkout and it's €1.99 .

Now I'd really like to know how you handle this today. Do you mask faces by hand? Use something online? Or just avoid filming those situations altogether?

Happy to answer anything.