Image to ASCII Art

An image to ASCII art converter rebuilds a picture out of plain text characters, swapping each region of the photo for a character whose visual density matches that region's brightness. This tool draws your uploaded image onto a hidden canvas, samples it on a grid, and for each cell maps the pixel's brightness to a character from a gradient ramp, dense glyphs like @ and # for dark areas, sparse ones like a period or a space for bright areas. You control three things. The width slider, from 40 to 200 characters, sets how many columns the output uses and therefore how much detail it preserves; wider means more nuance but a larger block of text. The character set switches between a dense ramp that yields smooth, photo-like gradients and a simple ramp that gives bold, poster-style contrast. The invert toggle flips the brightness-to-character mapping, which matters because the result is tuned for a light background by default. If you paste the art into a dark terminal or a dark-mode README, light and dark read backward, so inverting restores the intended look. High-contrast subjects convert best: portraits, logos, and silhouettes keep a clear shape, while busy scenes with lots of fine texture turn muddy at low widths. Because spacing carries the whole image, the output only looks right in a monospace font, so on the web wrap it in a pre tag. When you are happy with the live preview you can copy the text to the clipboard or download it as a .txt file, ready to drop into a README, a CLI welcome banner, an email signature, a forum post, or a chat message. All of the canvas sampling happens locally in your browser, so your source photos are never uploaded.