Blurring PII in Screenshots With Claude Code

So I was writing a blog post earlier today, and I hit the thing you always hit. I had two screenshots that needed to go up with the post, but one had my email in it and the other had a few business names and addresses. Okay, the usual dance is pull them into Preview, grab the blur tool, squint at it, line it up, crop, save.

Except I did not do any of that. I just asked Claude Code to blur them.

The whole thing took one line. I said something close to:

Blur my email and these two business names out of this screenshot.

Here is what Claude Code actually did when I ran that. It installed Tesseract (the open-source OCR engine from Google) via Homebrew, added the Python wrappers pytesseract and Pillow, and wrote a small script that uses OCR to find the exact bounding boxes where my email and those business names appeared in the image. Then it ran a Gaussian blur just on those boxes and saved a clean copy next to the original. Start to finish, a handful of seconds.

The tool is now saved in a recipes folder on my machine, so the next time I say "blur this," the script is already there and it just runs. Everything happens on my machine, so nothing uploads to a third-party site, and it does not hit a paid API.

If you want to do the same thing, you basically do not need anything else. You open Claude Code, point it at the image, and ask it to blur whatever text you want gone. It will handle the installs on your machine on the first run and save the tool so it is ready for round two. That is the whole trick.

What I really like is that it is in line with the work. I was writing the post IN Claude Code. I needed a screenshot redacted. I asked, it happened, I kept writing. The part I came for and the part right after it are the same session.

If you do anything public with screenshots, client names, phone numbers, CRM IDs, internal URLs, the friction on getting that stuff blurred is usually what makes people skip the step. Super nice to make that friction zero.

This is what I mean when I say Claude Code is not just for coding. It is an operating layer for the work.