Image to ASCII Art

How to Use the Image to ASCII Converter

Add an image

Click "Choose an image" or drag a photo, logo, or icon onto the drop zone. The picture is converted entirely on your device — nothing is uploaded anywhere. High-contrast images with a clear subject convert best.

Set the width

The width slider controls how many characters wide the art is — more characters mean more detail but a larger result. Start around 90 and increase for portraits or detailed images, decrease for simple shapes or to fit a narrow space.

Tune the look

Choose a character set — Standard, Detailed (more grey levels), Blocks (shaded squares), or Simple — and adjust contrast to make the subject pop. Tick "Invert" if you will paste the art onto a dark background so the light and dark areas read correctly.

Copy or download

When you are happy, copy the text to your clipboard or download it as a .txt file. Paste it into a README, a terminal banner, a chat message, a code comment, or anywhere monospaced text is shown.

How Images Become Text

Brightness, Mapped to Characters

ASCII art turns a picture into text by exploiting a simple visual trick: different characters have different "ink coverage." An @ or a # fills most of its cell with dark pixels, a + or = fills some, and a period or a space fills almost none. Line up characters from heaviest to lightest and you have a greyscale ramp made of glyphs. To convert an image, the tool shrinks it to a small grid — one character per cell — measures the brightness of each cell, and picks the character whose ink coverage matches that brightness. Bright areas of the photo become light characters or spaces; dark areas become dense characters. Step back from the screen, or shrink the text, and your eye blends the characters back into a recognisable image. It is the same principle as newspaper halftone printing, just with letters instead of dots.

Two details make the difference between a smudge and a recognisable picture. The first is brightness measurement: human eyes are far more sensitive to green than to red or blue, so the tool weights the colour channels accordingly (the standard luminance formula is roughly 30% red, 59% green, 11% blue) rather than averaging them naively — this keeps the tones faithful to how the image actually looks. The second is aspect ratio. Monospaced characters are taller than they are wide — typically about twice as tall — so if you used one character per pixel the result would look vertically stretched. The tool compensates by sampling roughly half as many rows as columns, which restores the image's true proportions. Add adjustable contrast to separate a subject from its background, an invert option for dark-themed displays, and a choice of character ramps from minimal to highly detailed, and you have control over exactly how the conversion reads.

"ASCII art is halftone printing for the keyboard era — brightness becomes a character, and a grid of letters becomes a picture your eye reassembles."

An Art Form Older Than the Web

Text-based images predate the modern internet by decades. Artists made pictures on typewriters in the 1800s, the technique flourished on teletype machines and line printers, and it became a defining aesthetic of bulletin-board systems, early email signatures, and Usenet in the 1980s and 90s. It endures because it is the most portable image format imaginable: pure text works in any terminal, any chat app, any code comment, any plain-text file, with no image support required at all. Developers still use it for command-line tool banners and README headers; gamers and chat communities use it for emotes and flair; and it remains a fun, low-stakes way to turn a favourite photo into something you can paste anywhere. Because this converter runs entirely in your browser, you can turn private photos, screenshots, or unreleased logos into ASCII without uploading them to anyone — the image is read locally and never leaves your device.

10 Facts About ASCII Art

01

ASCII art works by matching each character's ink coverage to a patch of brightness.

02

People made text images on typewriters as far back as the 1800s.

03

It became iconic on 1980s–90s bulletin-board systems and Usenet.

04

A dense glyph like @ reads as dark; a space reads as light.

05

The eye is most sensitive to green, so brightness weights it ~59%.

06

Monospace characters are about twice as tall as wide — the tool corrects for it.

07

A longer character ramp gives more grey levels and finer detail.

08

Inverting the ramp makes art readable on dark terminal backgrounds.

09

Pure text is the most portable image format — it works literally anywhere.

10

This converter runs in your browser — your image is never uploaded.

Frequently Asked Questions

Upload or drag in an image and it is converted instantly. The tool shrinks the picture to a character grid, measures the brightness of each cell, and replaces it with a character of matching density. Adjust the width, character set, contrast, and invert option to taste, then copy the text or download it as a .txt file.
High-contrast images with a clear subject convert best — a face, a logo, a silhouette, or anything where the subject stands out from its background. Busy or low-contrast photos can read as mush, but raising the contrast slider often rescues them. Simple, bold graphics give the cleanest results.
It should not, because the tool already corrects for the fact that monospaced characters are taller than they are wide by sampling about half as many rows as columns. If it looks off when pasted elsewhere, make sure you are viewing it in a true monospaced font — proportional fonts will distort the alignment that ASCII art depends on.
Each set is a "ramp" of characters from dark to light. Standard is a balanced 10-character ramp; Detailed uses around 70 characters for the finest grey gradation; Blocks uses shaded square glyphs for a solid, poster-like look; and Simple uses just a few characters for a bold, minimal style. Try each — the best one depends on your image and where you will paste it.
By default the art is built for dark text on a light background (like this page). If you will paste it somewhere with a dark background — a terminal, a dark-themed chat, or a code editor in dark mode — tick Invert so that bright areas of the image use dense characters and dark areas use sparse ones, keeping the picture readable.
No. The conversion happens entirely in your browser using an HTML canvas. The image is read locally and never uploaded, stored, or transmitted, so you can safely convert private photos, screenshots, or unreleased artwork. The tool also works offline once the page has loaded.
Anywhere that shows monospaced text: a README or wiki, a terminal banner, a code comment, a chat or forum message, a .txt file, or a command-line tool's startup output. For correct alignment, the destination must render it in a monospaced font — most code and terminal contexts do this automatically.
This tool produces classic monochrome ASCII based on brightness, which is the most portable form — it works as plain text anywhere. It converts colour to brightness using a perceptually weighted formula so the tones stay faithful, but the output itself is plain characters with no colour codes, so you can paste it into any text context without worrying about formatting.
It depends on where it will live. For a chat message or a narrow code comment, 60–80 characters keeps it compact; for a detailed portrait you want to view large, 120–200 captures far more nuance. A good habit is to match the width to the line length of wherever you will paste it so it does not wrap.
Completely free, with no account, sign-up, or usage limit. It runs entirely in your browser and collects no data. Convert as many images as you like.

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