Redact an ID photo on your phone, for free
You are on your phone, someone needs a copy of your ID, and the camera is right there. To redact an ID photo on your phone, take the photo, open it in the free Dress Docs app, cover what they don’t need, mark it for them, and send the export. The export is a fresh image, so the details your camera wrote into the original photo don’t come along. Here is how, step by step.
Take the photo
Lay the ID flat in good light, and keep the whole card in the frame, without glare across the text. Photograph only the side they asked for. If you don’t know what they need, ask first.
Redact the ID photo on your phone: cover, watermark, snip
Open the photo in the Dress Docs app. The tools:
- Rectangle and ellipse covers for numbers, signatures or anything else they don’t need. Covers are solid.
- Watermark to say who the copy is for, why and when. What to write is in how to watermark an ID copy.
- Snip to send only the part they asked for.
- Text and image, to add a line of text or a signature or stamp.
Which fields people usually cover is in what to redact on an ID card copy.
The export is a fresh image
When you export, the app captures the page you see as a new image and encodes it again. The metadata a camera writes into a photo, such as location, camera and date, comes from the source file, so it can’t carry over into the export. Why that matters: the metadata you forget to remove.
Your document stays on your device. The app does send error reports when something goes wrong; what they contain is on the compliance page.
PDFs: use the browser
The app works on photos of documents, not on PDFs, and has no Pro features. For a PDF, or for Pro features like search and cover, open Dress Docs in your browser on a computer.
Your original photo
Once the redacted copy is sent, the original photo is still a full copy of your ID. Delete it wherever you keep it once you no longer need it.
The free app is on the download page. For the whole routine, start with how to send an ID copy safely.