A free image to ASCII art converter
Image to ASCII turns any photo, logo or screenshot into ASCII art: a picture drawn with text characters. Pick one of nine looks, from the classic green-terminal style to Braille dot art, full colour, a pencil sketch or Matrix rain, then copy the text or save a sharp PNG. It is free, needs no account and adds no watermark, and your image is never uploaded: everything happens on your own device.
How an image becomes ASCII art
The image is scaled down to a grid with one cell per character. For each cell the brightness is worked out from red, green and blue with the standard luma weights 0.299·R + 0.587·G + 0.114·B. That brightness picks a character from a ramp that runs from empty to full, for example .:-=+*#%@. On a dark background a bright cell gets a dense character like @ and a dark cell stays empty; on the paper background it is the other way round, like ink. Because characters are about twice as tall as they are wide, the grid gets half as many rows as the image's shape would suggest: a 1600 × 900 photo at 120 columns becomes 120 × 34 characters.
Braille art: eight dots per character
The Unicode Braille Patterns block (U+2800 to U+28FF, added in Unicode 3.0 in 1999) holds all 256 combinations of a 2 × 4 dot cell. In Braille HD every dot is switched on or off by its own part of the picture, so one character carries eight picture points instead of one. At the same width that is eight times the detail, which is why Braille art is the best choice for faces and fine lines. With Floyd–Steinberg dithering (Robert Floyd and Louis Steinberg, 1976), each dot passes its rounding error on to its neighbours, so grey areas become a fine pattern of dots instead of flat black or white.
PNG, JPG, SVG and screenshots, without uploading
Most online converters send your picture to a server. This one uses the canvas of your own browser, so the image never leaves your device, there is no file size limit and the page keeps working offline once it has loaded. SVG logos are rasterised by the browser first and give especially crisp results. Animated GIFs use their first frame; for moving ASCII art, the ASCII webcam converts your camera live.
Tips for a better result
- Choose a clear subject. Portraits, logos, pets and silhouettes on a plain background convert best.
- Use enough columns. 120 to 200 columns for photos, 40 to 60 for something you want to paste in a chat.
- Raise the contrast when the art looks grey, or switch on Edges to outline the subject.
- Try Braille HD for faces, and Typewriter or Pencil sketch for something to print.
- Check with ◐ compare: drag the divider across to see the original next to the result.
Copy the text, or save a picture
Plain text only keeps its shape in a monospace font such as Consolas, Courier New or JetBrains Mono; in Arial the rows no longer line up. Copy for Discord wraps the art in a ``` code block, which Discord, Slack, Teams and GitHub show in a monospace font. A normal Discord message holds up to 2,000 characters, so the page warns you when the art is larger; lower the width to fit. Colour cannot travel in plain text, so for colour use the PNG (1×, 2× or 3×, optionally on a transparent background), the .html file, or ANSI, which adds 24-bit colour codes that most modern terminals display.
Keyboard shortcuts
1–9 looks · + / - more or fewer columns · E edges · I invert · C compare · F fullscreen · Ctrl+C copy text · Ctrl+S save PNG · Ctrl+V paste a new image.
Free to use
The art you make is yours, also for commercial work. The small credit line on PNG downloads can be switched off. Your last settings are remembered in this browser; the image itself is not stored. If the tool is useful, a coffee is appreciated but never required.
More ASCII tools
Make big banner text with the ASCII art generator, see yourself in ASCII with the ASCII webcam, or type your art out letter by letter with the terminal text animator. All free tools are on the apps page.