ASCII art is a picture drawn with nothing but characters, and it goes where an image cannot: a README, a commit message, a server login banner, a chat window that strips attachments. Drop a photograph in and the shading is worked out for you — darker areas get the heavier characters, lighter areas the sparser ones — and the result comes back in a box you can copy in one click.
A photograph, a screenshot, a logo — JPEG, PNG, WebP or AVIF. One at a time, because the result is text you read rather than files you collect.
The width here counts characters across, not pixels: a hundred is about right for a README, forty for a chat message. Wider means more detail and a bigger block of text.
The art appears in a box under the settings with a copy button beside it. Paste it anywhere that shows text in a fixed-width font.
Step by step, with screenshots: How to turn a photograph into ASCII art
Because whatever you pasted it into is not using a fixed-width font. ASCII art assumes every character occupies the same width, and a proportional font makes an i narrower than an m, which shears the picture. Paste it somewhere monospaced — a code block, a terminal, a README's fenced block — and it will line up.
It adds terminal colour codes around every character. Those are invisible in a terminal, which paints the character in colour instead — but anywhere that does not understand them, such as a README or a chat window, they show up as litter like [38;2;140;98;71m. It also makes the text about twenty times longer, so leave it off unless the destination is a terminal.
Classic is jp2a's own ramp and looks like the ASCII art you have seen before. Simple uses a short set that survives being pasted almost anywhere. Blocks uses shaded block characters, which reads more like a picture and less like text. Minimal is two characters only, for a stencil look.
Yes. Unlike the editing tools here, this one has to be done on our side, so the picture is sent to our servers, converted, and deleted automatically after a short period. Nothing about it is kept and nothing is shared.
Free Online Image Optimizer