It’s been a few weeks since we did a Sunday Spotlight, so in honor of the Genealogy Blurring Tool being approved for the Microsoft Edge Add-ons Store last week, after being approved for the Google Chrome web store and Firefox’s add-on repository, I’d like to feature this cool new add-on by Dan Maloney at Genea.ca (author of the excellent Genealogy Assistant, a Chrome add-on).
The Genealogy Blurring Tool is aptly named. It’s a tool that works with Ancestry, MyHeritage, FamilySearch, and FamilyTreeDNA, and it blurs the more sensitive elements of those genealogy websites when you want to take screenshots or do screencasts or are giving a presentation and want to show how those websites work or what you are finding on them, but you don’t want deeply-private information for living individuals to be displayed.
It could also be handy if you are doing research in a public library or a cafe or coffee shop, and you don’t want to other patrons seeing certain information.
Some of the blurred information can include:
- DNA match profile photos
- DNA match names (replaced with generic names like “Match #1”)
- Names of living people
The blurring effect is applied instantly (see the video below). A lot of us do like to share screenshots or put together presentations, and this can keep private information from being displayed while we do demonstrations in real-time, as well as sparing us having to manually blur information out with a graphics editing program.
Downloads:
- Genealogy Blurring Tool – Chrome Web Store
- Genealogy Blurring Tool – Get this Extension for 🦊 Firefox (en-CA)
- Genealogy Blurring Tool – Microsoft Edge Addons
Below is a video demonstrating it in action: