ASCII Converter turns a picture into text. Upload an image from your computer or point it at a picture URL, pick how wide the result should be and which characters to use, and the picture is re-rendered as ASCII art.
There are two ways. Upload a picture takes a file from your computer — drag it onto the panel or click to browse. Image URL takes a link to a picture that is already online, for example https://example.com/photo.jpg; a bare example.com/photo.jpg works too, because https:// is added automatically.
Supported formats are JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP, AVIF and BMP, up to 12 MB. Uploads are read directly by the page and are never sent to a server — you can confirm this by disconnecting from the network after choosing a file.
Browsers forbid a page from reading the pixels of an image loaded from another site. The canvas would be tainted and reading it would fail. To work around that, this site fetches the picture itself and hands it to the page from its own address.
That is the only thing the server does with it: the file is streamed straight back and is not stored. Requests that aim at the internal network are refused, and only actual picture formats are returned. If a host blocks the request or needs a login, the conversion cannot work for that URL — download the picture and use the upload instead.
The image is divided into a grid, one cell per character. Every cell is averaged to a single brightness value using the standard luma formula, and that value picks a glyph from the selected character set. Each ramp runs from the densest glyph to the lightest one, so dark areas come out dense and bright areas come out open.
Characters are about twice as tall as they are wide, and the grid accounts for that. Without this the result would look squashed, because the eye reads a page of text as taller than it is wide.
Width sets how many characters one line has; the number of lines follows from the picture's proportions. 40–80 columns is readable in a code editor, 100–160 shows more detail, and very wide output is best saved to a file.
Character set offers six ramps. classic uses 70 ASCII characters and is the most expressive. simple and binary are deliberately coarse and look good on photos. blocks and shades use Unicode blocks, which fill the cell more completely but are not plain ASCII — useful when the destination is a browser or a modern terminal rather than an email.
Tone holds the corrections: brightness and contrast rescue pictures that are too dark or too flat, invert swaps light for dark (turn it on for a light picture meant for a dark terminal), and coloured output keeps the original colours instead of reducing everything to characters.
Copy puts the plain text on the clipboard — paste it straight into a code block, a README, a commit message or a chat. Copy as HTML copies the coloured version, so pasting it into a page or an issue keeps the colours. The two download buttons save the same two forms as .txt and .html.
Show original toggles back to the picture, which is handy for checking whether a weak result is the converter's fault or the picture's.
The conversion is done by JavaScript in your own browser, on a canvas. The picture is not uploaded, not cached and not written to this server, and the result is not published anywhere — it exists in your tab until you close it or save it. Your chosen character set, width and tone settings are remembered in your browser's local storage so they survive a reload; the picture is not.
The server only sees the URL you type when you use the URL tab, and it only forwards that one request to the host you named.
You are responsible for the rights to every picture you convert. A picture can be protected by copyright, portrait rights or trademark law, and turning it into ASCII art does not free it: the result is a derivative work of that image. Use only pictures you own, that are in the public domain (check the licence, not just the absence of a copyright notice), or that you have permission to use. Photos of people are covered by portrait rights in many countries even when the photograph itself is freely licensed.
Because nothing is uploaded here, this site never receives your picture and never publishes your result — but that does not transfer any rights to you. To copy, share or publish a converted image you still need a lawful basis, and if you publish it yourself you are the one responsible for it.