how to blur part of images or photos without photoshop

is there any free offline tool or application to blur the pictures? this is the most common questions many people ask though there are professional tools like photoshop it is very expensive and does not fit the pockets for casual bloggers and content developers and skills of armatures.

though Mspaint offers few alternatives such as brushes to paint part of the image but it not only looks unprofessional it looks very shabby and ugly, though there are many free online portals that offer it as free service but sometimes it may be a bad idea when it comes to privacy because it is not good to upload the images if it contains sensitive or very personal information.

So is the only option is to buy expensive image editing software like photoshop?

Nopes! many don't know there is a free image editing and painting software alternative to photoshop called GIMP which does the job see below pic, the image really looks professionally blurred, whats more there are tons of filters in gimp which allow you to modify the images professionally.

how to blur the part of the image using gimp?
Open the image you want to modify in gimp, select the part of the image using select tool such as rectangular crop, elliptical crop or free hand crop and select the part of the image and right click on the image select "Filters"-->"Blur" and select appropriate type of blurring option to blur the image.

In the above pic i used Gaussian blur with 75% of horizontal and vertical radius you can reduce the intensity of blur by changing those radius values