Turn a Photo into ASCII Art, Entirely in Your Browser
This image to ASCII converter never sends your image anywhere — the conversion happens
locally using your browser's built-in Canvas API. Your photo is read directly from your
device, and each region is mapped to a character based on how bright or dark it is. Darker areas become
dense characters like @ and #, while lighter areas become
thin punctuation or blank space, building a text-based reproduction of the image.
The output only looks right in a monospace font — the same fixed-width font used for code — since ASCII art relies on every character occupying exactly the same width and height. Pasting it into a regular proportional-width font will scramble the alignment. We also correct for the fact that a monospace character cell is noticeably taller than it is wide: without that adjustment, a square photo would come out looking stretched vertically.
What does the character set control change?
Standard uses 10 characters and gives a clean, classic look. Detailed uses 70 characters for much smoother shading and finer gradients, at the cost of a busier, harder-to-read result at small sizes. Minimal uses just 6 characters for a bold, high-contrast graphic style — good for simple shapes and logos rather than photos with a lot of subtle shading.
What does the width slider do?
It sets how many characters wide the output is. A higher width keeps more detail from the original photo but produces a wider block of text that needs more horizontal room to display correctly — useful for a terminal or a wide code block. A lower width makes a more compact result that fits in a narrower space, like a chat message or a comment, at the cost of some detail.
Where can I use ASCII art?
ASCII art shows up anywhere plain text is welcome but images aren't: README files, code comments, terminal banners, forum posts, Discord and chat messages, and email signatures. Because it's just text, it works even in places that strip out images entirely.
Related tools
Want big text banners instead? Use the Big Text Generator. Need to read the actual text written inside an image? Try the Image to Text Converter (coming soon).
Last reviewed: August 2026