Convert images to text online using Text-Image

Posted on November 9, 2008 at 5:34 am

You’ve probably already seen a picture of someone or something converted into ASCII text at least once in your life. Basically, there are computer programs that take a photo, analyzes each pixel and generates a text character with the same color.

So what’s so great about this? Nothing really, except that it’s cool. It’s basically kind of like HTML art for geeks. If you search ASCII art in Google, you’ll find thousands of examples of what I’m talking about.

For example, here is a normal picture of someone:

And here is the same picture converted into an HTML document consisting of text characters, 0’s and 1’s to be specific.

Now you can paste this HTML code into your own webpage or you can take a screenshot of it and save it as a image. If you want to be different and geeky, you can make one of these and print it out an frame it! It will definitely be more interesting than the first picture.

Text-Image is the website that lets your create these text versions of images for free. Click on the Convert link and choose whether you want to convert to HTML, ASCII, or Matrix. HTML is like the one shown above, ASCII art will look like something like this:

Matrix will generate a green Matrix-style output. It’s pretty simple to use: choose a file, then pick the characters you want to make up your image (default is 0 and 1), choose the font size (smaller size will give better detail), choose a width for your image, choose to show color or just black and white, choose a background color and choose which browser you want the the code to be generated for (IE, Firefox).

You can convert BMP, GIF, JPEG, or PNG images to HTML-representations. You can copy the HTML code for the image by right-clicking and choosing View Source. You’ll easily be able to find the section because it’ll be a huge block of <FONT> tags.

You can copy that entire section and paste it into your own website, etc if you like. If you just want an image of it, you can use a free screen capture program and save it as an image file.

Overall, it’s a fun program to create some interesting art work out of text characters. Enjoy!

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