Image to ASCII Art Converter
Turn a photo or logo into ASCII art: choose the characters or type your own, keep the picture's colours, and save as text, PNG or SVG. Free, no upload.
Drop a picture here, or click to choose one
🔒 Converted inside your browser — your picture is never uploaded.
Dark to @, light to a space
Upload any image and this tool redraws it onto a small off-screen canvas, reads the pixels, and replaces each cell with a text character chosen by brightness. With the standard ramp, dark areas become dense characters like @ and % while light areas fade to . and spaces — or choose Detailed (70 shades), Blocks █▓▒░, Binary, Braille, or type your own set, darkest first. The width slider sets how many columns the art is, up to 400, with a number box beside it for an exact figure — more columns mean more detail but wider output. Brightness, contrast and gamma sliders (and an Auto button that reads the picture's own black and white points) rescue a flat or dark photo, dithering smooths a gradient that would otherwise band into flat runs of one character, and Outlines only turns a logo into its Sobel edges. The result is a monospace text block you can copy straight into a README, chat message, code comment, or terminal banner — or, with the picture's colours kept, save it as a coloured PNG or as an SVG whose letters are still real text.
How the conversion works
Each cell's average luminance is measured with the standard Rec. 601 weights (red 29.9%, green 58.7%, blue 11.4%) and mapped onto a ramp of characters ordered from dark to light. Because monospace glyphs are about twice as tall as they are wide, the tool samples roughly half as many rows as columns so your image keeps its proportions instead of looking stretched; the Character shape slider changes that ratio for a terminal or a font with a differently shaped cell. Everything is deterministic, so the same image at the same width always produces the same art.
Frequently asked questions
Is my image uploaded to a server?
No. The image is decoded and its pixels are read entirely inside your browser using a canvas. Nothing is uploaded, stored, or sent anywhere.
How do I get more detailed ASCII art?
Drag the width slider higher — up to 400 columns — and switch the character set to Detailed, which has 70 shades instead of ten. Turn on dithering to stop a smooth gradient banding, and use the contrast slider or the Auto button if the photo is flat. High-contrast images with a clear subject convert best.
Why does the art look wider than the original image?
Text characters are taller than they are wide, so the tool uses fewer rows than columns to compensate — the Character shape slider sets exactly how much, and 0.5 is a terminal. Viewed in a monospace font with normal line spacing, the proportions match the source image closely.
Can I save it as an image or a vector?
Yes. Save as picture (.png) draws the art in the same font and colours the box shows you, and Save as vector (.svg) writes the letters as real text, so the art scales to a wall print and can still be recoloured or searched.