Windows 11's Snipping Tool has the Quick redact feature that automatically detects and hides sensitive info.
Sharing screenshots can sometimes be more serious that it appears, especially if there’s information in them you probably don’t want other people to see. That could be an email address, phone number, account number, certain coordinates, a name of someone you don’t want to be associated with, or pretty much anything else that happens to be visible on the screen.
And although redacting information from screenshots was never particularly hard, as pretty much any image-editing software can do it, Windows 11’s Snipping Tool is making it even easier. Windows 11’s built-in screenshot tool has an underrated feature called
Quick redact, and it can automatically detect some sensitive info in a screenshot and cover them before you share the image.
1️⃣ Press
Win +
Shift +
S and take a screenshot.
2️⃣ Open the screenshot in Snipping Tool.
3️⃣ Click
Text actions in the toolbar.
4️⃣ Select
Quick redact.
5️⃣ Snipping Tool will automatically hide detected email addresses and phone numbers.
6️⃣ Save or copy the edited screenshot.
Now, it’s important to mention that the tool doesn’t automatically redact all sensitive information on a screenshot, because it can’t consistently recognize what you consider sensitive. Microsoft mostly programmed it to detect emails and phone numbers, and even though it can detect other info too, you’ll probably have to do some redaction manually.
Luckily, manual redaction is as easy. After opening Text actions, select the text you want to hide, right-click it, and choose Redact text. That lets you cover names, addresses, account numbers, IDs, or any other text the Snipping Tool manages to detect.
And if you’re worried about privacy, Microsoft
says Snipping Tool’s text recognition happens locally on the device, so the screenshot doesn’t need to be uploaded somewhere just to detect the text; unlike
Narrator image descriptions on non-Copilot+ PCs.
It’s a pretty small feature, but it can be very useful. Especially if you, like me, work with screenshots a lot. It’s much easier to let Snipping Tool do the redacting than to open another image editor and start drawing black rectangles over everything manually.
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