Why You Can’t Unblur Bumble Beeline

After the success of the tutorials I wrote unblurring Tinder matches, I started getting several requests for how to do similar hacks on other dating apps.

Unfortunately, much like OkCupid also does prevents this hack, Bumble engineers have taken steps to prevent users from unblurring people in their “beeline” – that is users that have liked their profile they haven’t swiped on yet.

Bumble Blurs the Image on the Server Side

Whereas Tinder send the browser an unblurred photo and then uses a browser filter to unblur the image, Bumble actually blurs the user’s photos on their servers – quite a bit actually – and then users a browser filter to smooth out the blur.

If you right-click on an image in your Chrome Browser and click Inspect, it’ll bring up a console that allows you to adjust the code that creates the webpage. You’ll note a line if you highlight one of the blurred images that reads: filter: blur(10px);

In Tinder, unblurring the images is as simple as changing the blur to 0, per our tutorial. Except, something odd happens when you change it to 0 in Bumble.

The images actually become more pixelized. The reason is that instead of serving an unblurred image to your computer, the team at Bumble instead blurs the images on their servers significantly. Then, once the image is served to your computer, your browser adds the second layer of blur (per the “filter: (10px);”) in order to make the images look smoother.

Since this seems to be a popular topic for dating app users, I’ll continue playing around with this from time to time and researching methods, but at this time it seems like if you want to see who likes you on Bumble you’ll need to pay up or keep swiping.