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Free Online Image to ASCII Art Generator

Turn a picture into ASCII art in your browser. Set the width in characters, choose from five character sets, and push the contrast when the result looks flat. Copy the text for a README or a terminal, or save it as a picture so the spacing survives being posted.

Free Forever Nothing Uploaded Five Character Sets Save as Picture

Free Online Image to ASCII Art Generator

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Image to ASCII Art Generator Nothing loaded yet

Drop a picture here It is turned into characters. Copy the text, or save it as a picture. Choose pictures One picture at a time • 40 MB • nothing is uploaded

The grid

Characters across 30 to 220 100

Contrast push the lights and darks apart 0

The characters

Character set More steps means smoother shading. Solid blocks read best at small sizes.

Light text on a dark background

Turn this on if you are pasting into a terminal or a dark themed page, or the picture will come out as a negative.

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Is It Safe to Do This Online?

A fair question, and the answer is checkable.

What happens to your picture	Most sites that do this	This page
Where the work is done	On their server	In your browser
Who else can see the picture	Whoever runs the server	Nobody, it never left
What happens to the GPS location	Reaches them before it is stripped	Never leaves your device
Can you verify the claim	No, you have to trust it	Yes, see below

Check it yourself. Press F12 to open your browser tools and go to the Network tab. Drop a picture in and use the tool. You will see the page fetch its own code and nothing else: your file is never sent. For a stronger test, load this page, turn off your wifi, and use it anyway. It still works, which would be impossible if a server were doing the job.

How to Turn a Picture Into ASCII Art

Drop, choose, download. Your originals are never touched.

Step 1 Drop in a picture. Faces, logos and silhouettes work best.

Step 2 Set how many characters across. More detail, but a wider block of text.

Step 3 Pick a character set, and push the contrast if it looks flat.

Step 4 Copy the text, save it as a file, or download it as a picture.

What Makes ASCII Art Readable

It is contrast, and it is the shape of the letters.

Contrast matters more than resolution. A photograph with a narrow range of tones turns into a grey mush of similar characters whatever width you choose. Pushing the contrast up separates the tones so the shapes come back.

Simple pictures work and busy ones do not. A face against a plain background, a logo, a silhouette: those read beautifully. A crowd scene at a hundred characters across is noise, because each character is being asked to stand for a region the size of a whole head.

The font has to be monospaced. Every character must take the same width or the columns will not line up and the picture falls apart. The box below uses one, and so does any code editor, terminal or preformatted block on a web page.

Line spacing is the other half. Characters are taller than they are wide, so the rows are worked out to compensate. If you paste the text somewhere with generous line spacing it will look stretched, and the fix is to set the line height to one.

Save it as a picture if you are posting it. Most places that accept a paste will reflow it, break the alignment or apply a proportional font, and the art disappears. The picture download keeps it exactly as you see it.

Key Features & Capabilities

What this tool does, and what it deliberately does not.

Never uploaded The picture is read and converted by your own browser, so nothing is sent anywhere.

Five character sets From a five step minimal ramp to seventeen steps of dense shading, plus solid blocks and ones and zeros.

Contrast control The single most useful setting here. A flat photograph becomes a readable picture once the tones are pushed apart.

Light on dark too Invert it for a terminal or a dark page, so it does not come out as a negative.

Save it as a picture Rendered to a PNG with the spacing locked, which is the only reliable way to post it anywhere.

Or take the plain text Copy it, or download a text file, ready for a code comment, a README or a terminal.

About the Image to ASCII Art Generator

ASCII art replaces each small region of a picture with a single character, choosing a heavy character where the region is dark and a light one where it is bright. From a distance the characters blur into tone and the picture reappears. It is an old trick and it still looks good.

Two settings decide whether it works. The first is width, which is how many characters stand in for the whole picture. Around a hundred is right for a face; much less and you have an icon, much more and you have a block of text too wide to sit anywhere.

The second is contrast, and it is the one people miss. Most photographs keep their tones bunched in the middle of the range, which means most regions map to roughly the same character and the result is an even grey mush. Pushing the tones apart is usually the difference between something unreadable and something that looks like the picture.

What you do with the result matters too. Plain text is right for a code comment, a README or a terminal, and the copy and download buttons give you that. But most places that take a paste will reflow the lines or apply a proportional font, and the art simply falls apart. When it is going somewhere public, save it as a picture instead: the spacing is locked in and it survives.

Everything is done in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.

Frequently Asked Questions

Widths, character sets, fonts and where to paste it.

Drop the picture here and it is converted as you watch. Each small region becomes one character, chosen by how bright that region is, so darker areas get heavier characters. Nothing is uploaded.

Almost always low contrast. When most of the picture sits in the middle of the brightness range, every character comes out roughly the same. Push the contrast slider up and the shapes reappear.

Eighty to a hundred and twenty characters is the sweet spot for a face or a logo. Below sixty it becomes an icon; above a hundred and eighty you have a very wide block of text that most places will wrap.

Because wherever you pasted it is using a proportional font, or adding line spacing. ASCII art needs every character the same width and the lines packed tightly. Use a code block, or download it as a picture instead.

Classic is the safe answer and works everywhere. Dense gives smoother shading when you have the width for it. Solid blocks read best when the result is going to be shown small, because the blocks carry tone rather than shape.

No. It is read by your browser and converted on your own machine. You can disconnect from the internet and the page still works.