Photo to ASCII Art Converter
Drop an image, get ASCII art. Runs entirely in your browser — your photos never leave your device.
Settings
characters wide
×
ASCII output
For best results display the output in a monospaced font (Courier, Consolas, Menlo).
What can you do with photo-to-ASCII art?
ASCII art was the original way to share pictures online — back when bandwidth was thin and graphical email was unheard of. It still has a few perfect use cases today, and the conversion is more interesting than typing in a search query.
- Discord and Slack messages — paste an ASCII portrait into a channel for a profile reveal or joke. Discord renders it cleanly in code blocks (wrap your output in triple backticks).
- Terminal banners and MOTDs — drop your logo into the SSH login banner or the top of your README. The "Unicode blocks" character set looks especially crisp here.
- GitHub READMEs — small ASCII portraits or logos inside
<pre>tags read perfectly in dark and light mode without any image hosting. - Code comments and easter eggs — long-standing tradition in open source. Keep the width under 80 chars to fit standard line limits.
- Retro art posts — Reddit's r/ASCII, BBS-style forums, Mastodon code blocks, and HackerNews comments all render ASCII art faithfully.
The converter ships with four character gradients. Standard is the classic @%#*+=-:. ramp — best for clean, recognisable shapes. Detailed uses 70 characters from $ down to a space, which captures portraits and high-contrast photos at higher widths. Unicode blocks uses █▓▒░ for a pixel-art feel. Binary outputs only 0 and 1 for a Matrix vibe.
Getting better-looking ASCII output
- High-contrast photos work best. Faces against a plain background, logos, silhouettes — anything with clear light and dark regions translates well. Busy backgrounds tend to muddy.
- Crop before uploading. If the subject only fills 30% of the frame, that's 70% of your ASCII canvas wasted on background. Crop tight and the result has far more presence.
- Increase contrast for portraits. Slide the contrast control to ~1.4× for human faces — most photos are too flat for the brightness ramp to pick out features clearly.
- Use the dark background option for logos. White-on-black ASCII art reads better than black-on-white in most messaging apps and READMEs that auto-detect dark mode.
- Match width to where you'll paste it. Discord: 80-100. README: 60-80. Terminal banner: 120-140. r/ASCII: anywhere up to 200.