Free Image to ASCII Art Converter
This free image to ASCII converter turns a picture into text art made of characters, where darker areas use heavy characters like @ and lighter areas use dots and spaces. Choose how many characters wide the art should be and which character set to use, then copy the text. Uploads up to 8 MB are processed in memory and never stored.
Image to ASCII Art
Images
About this tool
ASCII art draws a picture with the characters on your keyboard. It is popular for terminal banners, code comments, plain text emails, forum signatures and retro style graphics. Each character stands in for a small block of the picture, and heavier characters such as @ and # are used where the picture is dark, while dots and spaces are used where it is light.
Choose the width in characters first. Around 80 columns fits a typical code editor and email, 120 or more shows more detail but needs a wide screen and a small font. Pick a character set: classic is clean with ten levels, detailed uses about seventy characters for smooth shading, blocks uses solid shade characters, and simple uses only three. Characters are taller than wide, so the tool halves the row count to keep the picture in proportion.
Results look best with high contrast pictures, such as portraits and logos with a plain background. Tick invert when you will paste the art on a dark background, because then the light parts of the picture should use the heavy characters. View the text in a monospaced font, such as Consolas or Courier, or the lines will not line up. Wide art may wrap in narrow windows, so lower the width if it does.
Frequently asked questions
Why does my ASCII art look stretched or crooked?
The text must be shown in a monospaced font, where every character is the same width, such as Consolas, Courier New or Menlo. In a normal font the lines do not line up. Also make sure the window is wide enough for the number of columns you chose, or lines will wrap.
What does the invert option do?
By default, dark parts of the picture get heavy characters, which suits black text on a white page. On a dark background such as a terminal, text is light and the background is dark, so the picture appears reversed. Tick invert to swap the mapping and make it look right there.
What width should I choose?
Use 60 to 100 characters for emails, comments and forum posts. Use 100 to 160 for a full width terminal or a printed poster with a small font. Smaller widths lose detail but are easier to share. The maximum here is 200 characters wide.
Which pictures work best?
Simple pictures with strong contrast and a clear subject, like a face against a plain background, a logo or a silhouette. Busy photos with many small details turn into noise at low widths. Cropping close to the subject before you convert makes a big difference.
Is my picture stored anywhere?
No. The file is held in memory while it is converted and discarded when the page finishes loading. It is not saved to disk or shared, and only the text you see in the result is returned to your browser.