Image to ASCII Art Generator

How to use

1. 1Drop an image onto the dropzone or click to choose a file. JPG, PNG, WEBP, GIF, BMP, and AVIF up to 15 MB are supported.
2. 2Set the output width in characters (80 to 120 reads well in chat and gists; 160 plus suits a wide terminal). Adjust the cell aspect ratio to 2:1 if the result looks squashed.
3. 3Pick a character ramp (try Standard 70 for portraits, Block shading for solid mass, or Binary for retro looks). Tweak brightness, contrast, and edge emphasis until the subject reads clearly.
4. 4Use Copy text to put the ASCII on your clipboard, Download .txt for a plain-text file, or Download .png to export the same art as a shareable image with a chosen background and glyph color.

About this tool

Image to ASCII Art Generator turns any photo, illustration, logo, or screenshot into a block of monospaced text characters that recreates the original picture using brightness alone. Drop a JPG, PNG, WEBP, GIF, BMP, or AVIF onto the page and the file is decoded by your browser, downsampled to a configurable character grid, and mapped one cell at a time to a glyph chosen from a character ramp ordered from darkest (densest) to lightest (sparsest). The defaults work straight away, but every step is exposed: pick the output width from 20 to 240 characters (80 to 120 reads well in chat windows and gists, 160 plus suits a wide terminal or a large image export); pick the cell aspect ratio so the rendered text keeps the original image's proportions in any monospace font (most fonts are about twice as tall as they are wide, so 2:1 is the sensible default); adjust brightness and contrast to push faint subjects out of the noise; and turn on edge emphasis to run a Sobel edge pass that darkens outlines so faces, signage, and silhouettes stay readable even at low widths. Choose from six built-in character ramps (the classic 70-character Bourke ramp, a tight 10-character shading ramp, a minimal 5-character ramp for thumbnails, a binary 1/0 ramp for retro Matrix output, a Unicode block-element ramp for filled visual mass, and a letters-and-digits ramp for a busier look) or supply your own ramp ordered from darkest to lightest. Invert brightness in one click for dark photos that should appear on a light background or for white-on-black terminal-style output. The live preview uses the exact text the tool will copy and download, with selectable dark or light preview backgrounds and an adjustable preview font size from 5 to 16 px so you can confirm the result at the real size you intend to share. Output can be copied to the clipboard as plain text, downloaded as a .txt file (great for README banners, GitHub gists, terminal MOTD files, and Discord code blocks), or exported as a PNG image with a configurable background (black, white, or transparent) and glyph color, so the art reads cleanly on social media without depending on the recipient's font. Decoding, resizing, brightness mapping, and rendering all run on your device using the standard Canvas API, so the photos and screenshots you convert here are never uploaded.

Free to use. Works in your browser. No signup, no login.