Document Shield

Sharing a copy of your passport to check in at a hotel, verify your identity for a rental, or complete an employment check is a normal part of modern life — but handing over a full, unmodified document exposes far more personal data than any legitimate recipient needs. Your passport number, date of birth, MRZ machine-readable zone, and personal identification number are all targets for identity theft if the document ends up in the wrong hands. Document Shield lets you cover exactly what you want hidden — with solid black redactions, blurred regions, or pixelated overlays — before the document ever leaves your device.

How to use

1. Upload your document. Drag a JPG, PNG, WebP, or PDF (up to 100 MB) onto the upload area or click to browse. The file is read into your browser's memory locally and is not transmitted to any server.
2. Choose your sharing purpose. Select why you are sharing the document: hotel check-in, Airbnb verification, rental application, employment verification, age verification, identity check, banking, government request, or other. Document Shield shows you a privacy recommendation specific to that use case — which fields to show and which to hide.
3. Annotate your document. Use the four tools to protect sensitive areas: Redact draws a solid black box; Blur applies a blur effect over a region; Pixelate replaces a region with a pixel grid; Highlight adds a yellow overlay to mark fields you are deliberately leaving visible. Click any annotation to select and delete it if needed.
4. Add a watermark (optional). Enable the watermark to stamp the document with a purpose-specific label such as "For Hotel Use Only" — this prevents a recipient from reusing your shared copy for a different purpose. Adjust position and opacity as needed.
5. Export. Download the protected document as a flattened PDF, PNG, or JPG. All annotations are permanently embedded — there is no hidden layer and no way to remove the redactions from the exported file.

What to hide and what to show

• Hotel check-in. Show: your name, photo, document type, and expiry date. Hide: document number, personal ID or SSN, date of birth, place of birth, signature, QR codes and barcodes, and the MRZ strip at the bottom.
• Short-term rental (Airbnb, VRBO). Show: your name, photo, and document type. Hide: document number, SSN, date of birth, address, signature, and MRZ.
• Rental application. Show: name, photo, document type, and address. Hide: document number, SSN, date of birth, signature, QR codes, and MRZ.
• Employment verification. Show: name, photo, document type, nationality, and work authorization status. Hide: document number, SSN, date of birth, address, and MRZ.
• Age verification. Show: photo, date of birth, and document type. Hide: everything else — name, document number, address, MRZ.

Why use PixMidas

• Locally processed. Document Shield is designed to process files locally in your browser. No file upload is required and the document content is not transmitted to any server.
• Purpose-aware recommendations. Each sharing purpose comes with a pre-filled list of what to show and what to hide — based on what recipients legitimately need vs. what creates unnecessary identity risk.
• Permanently flattened exports. The exported file contains the document as a flat image with all annotations burned in. There are no layers, no metadata, no way to reverse the redactions.
• No account needed. Open the tool and start immediately. No sign-up, no subscription, no watermarks on your output.

Frequently asked questions

Is the document I upload sent to a server?

No. Document Shield is designed to process files locally using the Canvas API (for images) and PDF.js (for PDFs). Your file is read into your browser's memory via the File API and processed locally. The document content is not transmitted to any server. Note that PDF.js and export libraries are loaded from CDN on first use, which involves standard network requests — only the libraries themselves are fetched, not your document.

Can the redactions be removed from the exported file?

No. The export renders the document as a flat image — a PNG, JPG, or image-based PDF with each page converted to a rasterized bitmap. There are no layers, no text extraction, no reversible transformations. The black boxes, blurred regions, and pixelated areas are permanently part of the image pixels. A recipient cannot undo or see through them.

Which file types are supported?

Input: JPG, JPEG, PNG, WebP, and PDF (up to 100 MB). Output: PDF (recommended for multi-page documents), PNG (lossless), or JPG (smallest file size). For PDFs, each page is rendered to a canvas, annotated, and re-assembled into a new PDF — the output is an image-based PDF, not a searchable or editable one.

What is the difference between Redact, Blur, and Pixelate?

Redact covers the region with a solid black fill — the most widely recognized and legally accepted way to hide information in formal documents. Blur applies a Gaussian blur over the region — it hides text legibly but softens the visual impact. Pixelate replaces the region with a large pixel grid — it is visually distinctive and makes clear that information was intentionally concealed. All three are equally effective at hiding the underlying content in the exported file.

What is the Highlight tool for?

Highlight marks fields you are deliberately choosing to show with a semi-transparent yellow overlay. Use it to call attention to the specific information you are sharing — it signals to the recipient that you have intentionally disclosed this field while protecting everything else.

What does the watermark do?

The watermark stamps the document with a purpose-specific label such as "For Hotel Use Only" or "For Verification Only." This limits the document's reusability — a copy shared with a hotel cannot plausibly be reused for a banking KYC check if it carries a visible hotel-specific watermark. The watermark is burned into the export alongside the redactions and cannot be removed.

Can I use this on a multi-page PDF?

Yes. Document Shield renders PDFs page by page. Each page is displayed individually and you can apply annotations independently to each page. When you export, all pages are assembled into a single output PDF with their respective annotations permanently applied.

Does this work on mobile?

Yes, Document Shield works on phones and tablets. Touch events are supported for all drawing and annotation tools. On small screens, use the zoom controls to enlarge specific areas before drawing, which improves annotation precision for small document fields.