Auto Blind Auto Blur

Auto Blind Auto Blur (ABAB) is titled to describe its purpose.  It automatically blurs out or puts a mask (blinds) across the eyes of people in photographs. It can do this for single or multiple people and is an effective means of capturing the activity of a photograph without needlessly capturing the likeness of the people within it.

There are not many options in the app which adds to its ease of use. It is all self-explanatory and the icon designs clearly convey their purpose.  You can take photographs within the app or process those already saved. In both cases, the image will begin unchanged from what was taken and the user can then toggle on or off the blurring and/or mask.  Once done, the anonymised photograph can be saved to the device.

For its purpose, the app does not need to do anything else and so its simplicity is to be welcomed over having a complexity-adding array of options that are never used.  The only feature that feels missing is one to modify multiple photographs as a single task. As it is, you need to open and modify each photograph at a time.  Being able to mark multiple files for processing at a single click would be very useful but is lacking for the moment.

 You might be wondering how such an app as this has come to be featured on an educational site. How might teachers and students use it?

In our day-to-day lives we have become used to capturing images of the commonplace and the special.  It is no surprise that we would like to do the same thing in the classroom but teachers have to be very sensitive to how images are stored, used, and distributed.  School policies cover photographs of students and staff.

Photographs, such as formal pictures,  are captured under controlled circumstances and are passed to parents and this app is not for those cases.  However, there are many other uses of photographs where incidental images of faces are captured but do not need to be.  Increasing the anonymity of photographs should reduce the number of conflicts between the use of them in the classroom and school policy.

Teachers, particularly student teachers, often need to build a portfolio as part of their ongoing professional development. The focus of any photographs captured in these pictures is not the children but the task.  In an ever-evolving flurry of classroom activity, it can be very difficult to avoid capturing faces and time consuming to go back and edit pictures. ABAB takes away both concerns.

Children are also sometimes entrusted with cameras to record their work in projects. They, quite rightly, are not burdened with the rules of school policy or permissions but the resulting photographs are.  Quickly running the photos through this app leaves them in a form where they should fit in with school rules.

In practice, this app works well.  It is equally usable on a phone or on a tablet and consistently blurs or masks the correct parts of each picture.  While the app has proven reliable during this review, there is always the chance that an edge case could fool it and leave a face uncovered so teachers should always check each photograph to make sure that it has been anonymised in the correct way.  There may be other identifying parts of an image that are not faces but may conflict with school policy so this is a wise strategy whatever anonymising system you use.

The app is available in a limited free version with advertisements and this is useful for appraising the app but you will need to unlock it with an in-app purchase to gain the fully-featured and usable product reviewed here.

ABAB is simple to use and effective. It solves a problem that is often met in the school environment and does so in a way that makes it a useful tool for teachers and students alike.