In the recent discussions others and I have brought up the problem of obscuring faces and license plates (per LG best practices)when posting a video on Maps. I have created two examples. One is of a customer walking through my shot while videoing in a coffee shop. I did not upload this video. The second was not shot for Maps. It is just a walk around a nice, blue vintage Jaguar. It starts with a photo, so obscuring the license plate was easy to start with. But as I walk around the car, obscuring the plate is more difficult, especially because of the camera’s changing relationship to the plate.
I used Capcut to do the edits. It is extremely tedious, and hard to do well. At this point if you shoot a video that requires obscuring For privacy, I would just reshoot it.
To do the blur effect you have to
overlay a copy of the video on top o0f the original
apply a blur effect to the overlay video
apply a mask to the overlay video
add key frames and make adjustments to the mask as the video plays out.
I know of no Android video editing software that will automatically track an object.
Thanks for this post. I fully agree that it is a pain to blur faces and license plates in videos. So much so that I have decided not to bother. Requesting Maps users to blur without providing the necessary tools to do so is in my opinion plenty of excuse for not doing it. So it comes down to not uploading such videos or sharing them without blurring. Since I’m not a big contributor of videos, I opted for the latter. But still, I try to avoid faces when possible.
hello @Rednewt74 blurring people’s faces in photos can be really tiring and annoying sometimes, even I think it affects the beauty of the photo, but when I think about it, this is true because the person on the other side may not want to be seen in your photo. For this reason, I avoid blurring people and try to give the space as detailed as possible by shooting the corners where there are few people as much as possible with a wider angle.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts. In practice I rarely have the need to do any privacy blurring. I usually have enough time to wait and get a shot that doesn’t have a face in it. With the coffee shop video, I simply reshot it a second or two later and had no issue. I don’t feel that I have to blur every employee’s face. @Gezendunyali, I agree that blurring faces does reduce the aesthetic quality of the photo. In this test video I exaggerated the blur on purpose to make it easier to see. For photos, I have found an app that allows very precise control of the blur effect so that it can be effective but hardly noticeable. Based on my experiment I think I will rarely make the effort to blur a video. MortenCopenhagen, I agree that Google should provide a tool to do this.
As for faces I take an effort to blur them by not getting them in the first place. For license plates I don’t bother as they are public(you drive around with them exposed 24/7)
Love the discussion, @Rednewt74 - lots of great insights on best practices here. Similarly to @Gezendunyali I try to allow some space between myself and others for great shots and if they happen to be in a shot and aren’t budging, I try to avoid their faces at all or any photos in too close proximity. Of course , I think situations like concerts, major attractions /landmarks, etc. in which a ton of videography and photography is already happening may be quite difficult considering the levels and amounts of people. However, even in those instances some discretion should be advised.
Hi Guys, there is a convenient software for that called Gallio PRO (www.gallio.pro). The price may be prohibitive if you have just a few photos to process. However if you have more photos or movies with plenty of moving faces to cover, it is dirt cheap copmared to man-hours of manual work (or even online services which charge you in pay-per-use model).
