Image editing
Image to ASCII Art
Turn a photo or logo into ASCII art made of text characters, with a live preview and plain-text or full-color output.
Processed on your device — nothing is sent anywhere.
Works in your browser. No account needed.
Frequently asked questions
Is my image uploaded anywhere?
No. The image is decoded and converted by JavaScript running in your browser, and the text, PNG and HTML files are generated on your device. Nothing is sent to a server, so private photos stay private.
Which character set should I choose?
Standard uses 10 characters from space to @ and gives the classic, bold ASCII look that survives any font. Detailed uses a 70-character ramp for smoother gradients in photos. Blocks uses the shading characters ░▒▓█ for a solid, pixel-art feel. Braille packs a 2 × 4 grid of dots into each character, so it shows the most detail at a given width — but strictly speaking it is Unicode art rather than ASCII, and a few fonts and older terminals do not display braille characters.
Why does my ASCII art look stretched or squashed?
Text characters are roughly twice as tall as they are wide, so one character per image pixel would make the picture look twice as tall. The “Correct for tall monospace characters” option halves the number of rows to compensate. If the result still looks off in the place you paste it, nudge the width ÷ height slider — below 0.5 for fonts with generous line spacing, above 0.5 for tight ones — or untick it if the art will be displayed with square cells.
Why does the art look broken when I paste it?
ASCII art only lines up in a monospace font, where every character has the same width. Paste it into a code block (three backticks in Discord, Slack, GitHub or Markdown), a plain-text editor, or a terminal. Proportional fonts in emails, word processors and most social posts will scramble the columns.
What is the difference between plain text and color output?
Plain text is just characters, which you can paste anywhere. Color mode tints each character with the average color of the part of the image it covers; because plain text cannot carry color, that version is kept in the HTML download and the PNG image. Copy text always copies the uncolored characters.
What width should I use?
Around 60–80 characters fits a chat message or terminal without wrapping. 100–150 gives a recognizable portrait or logo in a README or code comment. 200–300 captures fine detail but is best viewed zoomed out, saved as a PNG, or opened as HTML, since the lines are far wider than a normal text window.
About this tool
This tool converts a picture into ASCII art — an image drawn entirely with text characters. Each character stands in for a small patch of the image: dense characters such as @ and # for dark areas, light ones such as dots and colons for bright areas, and spaces for white. Drop in a photo, logo or screenshot, and the preview shows the result immediately in a monospace block; every slider change redraws it live.
Under the hood, the image is first scaled down on a canvas to exactly one pixel per character (or 2 × 4 pixels per character for braille), averaging the colors inside each patch. Each pixel’s brightness is then adjusted by the Brightness and Contrast sliders and mapped onto the chosen character ramp. Braille mode goes further: it uses error-diffusion dithering to decide which of the eight dots in each character to raise, so mid-tones become a fine dot pattern instead of blotches. Transparent areas in a PNG are treated as white.
Four settings do most of the work. Width controls detail. The character set controls texture. Invert swaps the ramp so bright areas get dense characters, which is what you want when the art will be shown as light text on a dark background, such as a terminal or a dark-mode chat. Aspect correction compensates for characters being taller than they are wide, so faces and circles keep their proportions. Photos usually benefit from a little extra contrast; logos and line drawings with a plain background convert cleanly as they are.
The outputs cover the common destinations. Copy text for pasting into Discord, Slack, a GitHub README, a code comment or a terminal banner. Download .txt for a plain file saved as UTF-8. Download PNG renders the art as an image, in color if you chose color output, for sharing where monospace text is not available. Download HTML saves a self-contained web page that keeps the per-character colors in color mode. Everything runs on your own device, so the tool works offline once loaded and nothing is uploaded.