Friday Fun: Turn Your Images into ASCII Art with This Android App

by Sean Setters

While casually looking through the Play store yesterday, Google suggested I take a look at an app called ASCII Art. As Google seems to know me fairly well (we've spent a lot of time together), I thought I'd give the app a shot. After about 20 minutes of throwing various images at the app to see its results displayed in glorious monospaced text, the point about Google knowing me very well was reiterated once again.

From Wikipedia:

ASCII – Abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Most modern character-encoding schemes are based on ASCII, although they support many additional characters.
From the viewpoint of a photographer who's always looking at high resolution, 14-bit, as-sharp-as-I-can-get images, there's something very fun and novel about seeing one's images displayed in a fixed size font. You can even choose to have your image converted using colored text for a slightly less archaic look.

After conversion, the file can be saved or shared as a .PNG, .TXT or HTML document (you'll need to change the file name extension from ".txt" to ".html" after saving). Click here to see the full resolution ASCII image from above.

I haven't done extensive testing, but my guess is that simpler images with a strong subject will work better than more complex ones. If you download and try out the app, share your favorite ASCII-converted (G-rated) image below.

Posted: 1/26/2018 8:15:05 AM ET   Posted By: Sean
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