How to use Blotmarked

It will miss things. Handwriting, stamps, a signature, text baked into a photograph, a name in an unusual format. This is why there is a page-by-page check near the end, and it is the most important step in the app.

The black bars are permanent. The saved file is rebuilt from flattened images, so there is no text hiding underneath and no layer to peel back. That is a real difference: a black rectangle drawn over readable text is how redactions usually leak.

You keep the original. Blotmarked never alters it. You get a new file beside it.

Choose files takes PDFs, JPG, PNG and WebP, and several at once. The first opens on the page, and FILES at the top of the page lists the rest. Scan with camera photographs paper, one page per photo. To photograph the next page, tap FILES, then Take another photo.

Everything stays in your browser's memory. Closing the tab forgets all of it.

The page opens with nothing hidden and no tool chosen. You decide how to redact it.

Scan finds names, numbers, addresses and bank details for you. It asks for the rules first, then blacks out whatever they match. Scan again after changing the rules replaces the earlier result and keeps your own marks. Box drags a rectangle over anything - stamps, letterheads, handwriting, a face. Pen is freehand, for awkward shapes. Tap a chosen tool again to put it down, so you can zoom and scroll the page freely. While box or pen is chosen, one finger draws and two fingers move and zoom the page - and the whole page fits the screen to begin with, so there is usually nothing to move until you zoom in.

The rules for a scan. Jurisdiction sets what counts as personal data. EU/GDPR is the default, and "strictest reading" applies the tightest rule across all of them - use that when you are not sure. Who is receiving it drops categories irrelevant to that audience: a landlord has no business seeing your national ID. Language only matters for scans and photographs, which are read letter by letter, and defaults to your device's language. The category switches are the last word.

Found items appears after a scan that found something. Each row is one value, not one occurrence: if your name appears eleven times across four pages, that is one row, and tapping it handles all eleven. Each row shows how confident the scan is. High means a checksum passed or the format is unmistakable, like an IBAN. Medium is a strong pattern match. Low is a guess worth showing you - it does not mean wrong; it means look at it.

Undo last reverses the most recent change, whatever it was: a box, a pen stroke, a whole scan, a bar you took off, or Undo all. Tap again to go further back.

Select to undo, then tap any black bar to take it off. A bar the scan made becomes a green outline; tap the outline to hide it again.

Undo all takes every bar off at once. Nothing is lost: Undo last brings them all back.

Using a keyboard? Choose Box and the page takes focus. The arrow keys move a crosshair, and holding Shift moves it further. Press Enter to set one corner, move to the opposite corner, and press Enter again. Escape cancels. Every box you draw is listed under the tools, where you can remove it. What the scan found can be kept or hidden from Found items.

This is the step that catches what detection cannot see. Check pages gives you one row per page and a box to tick. Ticking is you saying you have looked. Nothing forces you to, and nothing should - but the app cannot see a signature, and you can.

Before the file is written, Blotmarked re-opens its own output and tries to extract text from it. If anything readable is left, it refuses to save, and tells you why rather than handing you a file you cannot trust.

Choose PDF or, for a single photo or image, PNG. The file is named after the original with -blotmarked added. The screen after saving shows that name and says where the file went. On a computer that is your downloads folder. On a phone it is Downloads, which you open from your Files app (on some phones called File Manager) - not your photo gallery.

On a phone, Save or share opens the phone's own share menu, which can put the file in your gallery, a cloud drive or a message. The file goes only where you choose there. Download again saves the same file a second time.

The name comes from the original file, so rename it afterwards if that name says something the contents no longer do: Anna_Schmidt_payslip_March.pdf tells a story even when the contents are spotless.

You pay per finished document, not per month. There is no subscription and nothing recurring. One credit covers saving one redacted document, however many pages it has.

Everything up to saving is free. Opening a file, scanning it, reviewing what was found, drawing your own boxes, checking the pages - none of it costs anything. You can put a document through the whole process and see exactly what you would get before deciding to pay for it.

Buy one document, or buy a pack. A single document is the cheapest way to try it, and the larger packs bring the price per document down. Current prices are on the Credits screen in the app - they are the live ones, where a number written into a guide would quietly go out of date. Prices include VAT.

Credits you bought do not expire. Buy ten, use three today and seven next year. Free credits from a test code are the exception: those end on the date in the message that sent them.

Payment runs on Stripe. Choosing a pack opens Stripe's own payment page, where you will see card - Visa, Mastercard, American Express and the usual others - plus Apple Pay or Google Pay if your device offers them, and any other local method Stripe supports where you are.

We never see your card. The number, the expiry and the security code are typed on Stripe's page and go to Stripe, not to us. What reaches us is that a payment succeeded, for which pack, and an address to send the code to.

You get an email receipt with your credit code in it, and the credits are on the device you paid from straight away. Paid on a laptop and want them on your phone? Enter that code under Credits there.

Paying another way. If you have arranged something with us directly - cash, a transfer, an invoice - we record it by hand and you get the same thing: a credit code and a receipt.

One credit covers saving one redacted document. Opening, reviewing, marking up and checking cost nothing - only the finished file does.

Credits are held under a credit code that looks like BMF52C-4P9Z-7FA9 and arrives by email when you buy. There is no account and no password: the code is the balance.

Keep it - it is the only way back to those credits. It works on any device. And anyone holding it can spend it, so treat it like cash rather than like a receipt.

Refunds. If you bought credits and could not use them, request a refund here. Once a credit has been spent the redacted file is on your device and cannot be taken back, so those credits are not refundable. If something went wrong - charged twice, credits that never arrived - use the same form, or reply to your receipt and a person will look at it.

We never receive your document. Not the file, not the text, not the names in it, not the redacted version. It never leaves your device, so there is nothing for us to look at, hand over, or lose. Full detail is in the privacy policy.

The honest consequence: if you lose your credit code, we cannot look you up. There is no account to find. That is the trade.

The scan never finishes. Usually a very large image. Try a smaller or clearer photograph, or mark the page by hand with the box tool.

It found nothing on a scanned page. Check the language on the rules screen matches the document - a scan is read letter by letter, and a mismatched language reads badly. If your language is not available, Blotmarked reads the page in English and says so above the page. Names are the most likely thing to be missed, so check those pages.

It refused to save. That is the verification step working: something readable survived. Go back, find what was missed, and add a box over it.

You are asked for credits mid-way. The document and every decision you made are still there. Add credits and carry straight on.

It works offline. Once the app has been opened once, redaction needs no connection at all. Only buying credits does.

Install it. Added to your home screen it opens full screen, works offline, and can receive documents straight from the share sheet.

Closing forgets everything, deliberately. Save what you need before you go.

A screenshot of a redacted page is safe. The black is part of the picture, not a rectangle sitting on top of text that is still underneath. Screenshot it, photograph it, print it - there is nothing left to recover.