Skip to main content

Two Sites To Instantly Convert Your Images To Text


ASCII and HTML art has long been a time consuming, but much rewarding geeky art form. The process consists of recreating an image or scene by solely using respectively plain or colored text characters.
The images which this results in serves little practical purpose other than retro entertainment. The scenes that can be rendered using these techniques are often nothing short of astounding.
This once tedious process has long since been simplified for the common human being as well. Everyone can now create incredibly looking text art in just seconds.
For this article, we would like to focus on online services to convert images to text. With the two sites we’ll discuss below, you can upload your own images, and convert them to ASCII, HTML and even Matrix text art.

Photo2Text

Photo2Text quickly converts any picture to ASCII art. After selecting and uploading a picture of your choice, the site will select characters to convert your images to text. The detail that this technique can render is amazing.
Screen shot 2009-12-17 at 18.46.48

After rendering, you’ll be shown a first example of the ASCII art, as demonstrated below. After choosing a nickname for the project, you’ll have the possibility of applying different character sets and tweaking the brightness. When you’re happy with the results, you can download the ASCII art as a text file to your computer.
Screen shot 2009-12-17 at 18.50.45

TEXT-IMAGE

The next site does more than just convert images to text, it also offers three wholly different varieties; HTML, ASCII and Matrix.
The ASCII conversion is very similar to that of the preceding site; the image will be converted to ASCII art, with characters chosen to resemble the contents of the image. Unlike with Photo2Text, you can’t specify different character sets, but the other options more than compensate for this lacking.
Apart from black text on a white background, you can also opt for different color combinations, as well as a different image width (to render more detail) and enhanced contrast.
Screen shot 2009-12-17 at 18.34.48
Matrix conversion is a spin on the standard ASCII conversion. It uses an alien-like Matrix font, and renders green text on a black background, creating an impressive science fiction scene.
More interesting however is the HTML conversion. Instead of trying to mimic the image contents, this conversion simply repeats a random, or otherwise specified string of characters. Your picture is then replicated by text coloring. The algorithm might be a little simpler, but it delivers interesting results. You can again specify an image width to attain that extra detail, as well as pick an alternative background color. If you want, you can also render your image in greyscale or monochrome and apply extra contrast.
Since the image is rendered in HTML, it does not always show very well in different browsers. Prior to conversion, you can specify which browser you’re using to get the best results.
Screen shot 2009-12-17 at 18.37.57
These are but two services to convert images to text art. If you know of any other online or offline apps, please share them with us in the comments section below!
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document?  That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the docum...
1 comment
Read more

Build Your Own Awesome Personal 3D Avatar with Avatara

Do you use social networks and want to build your own awesome 3D avatar? Maybe you want to send someone a cute cuddly image of yourself (kind of)? Or maybe you have your own ideas of what you would do with an Avatar… Well look no further than Avatara which I discovered from the MakeUseOf directory . You can create 3d avatars out of pre-set up templates or create your own from scratch. To start, visit Avatara’s homepage . You will see this screen: Click Get Started to umm, get started! That will take you to this screen: You see that you can build your own Avatar using an uploaded head shot like the Obama one above (just an example, guys). Or roll with one of their awesome avatars. I chose to start with a blank avatar by clicking Start with a blank avatar at the bottom of the screen. That takes you to here: I clicked on the filter at the top and told it to filter out everything but male characters and then I saw this: I rolled with Buck and continued. You need to click Select...
1 comment
Read more

Ex-Skypers Launch Virtual Whiteboard Deekit

Although seriously long in the tooth and being disrupted by a plethora of startups, for many years Skype has existed as an almost ubiquitous app in any remote team’s toolkit. So it seems apt that a new startup founded by a team of ex-Skype employees is set to tackle another aspect of online collaboration. Deekit, which exits private beta today, is a virtual and collaborative whiteboard to help remote teams work smarter. The Tallinn, Estonia-based startup is headed up by founder and CEO, Kaili Kleemeier, who was previously a Head of Operations at Skype. She and three colleagues quit the Internet calling giant in 2012 and spent a year researching ideas in the remote team space. They ended up focusing on creating a new virtual whiteboard, born out of Kleemeier’s experience collaborating with technical teams remotely, specifically helping Skype deal with incident management. “Working with remote teams has been a challenge in many ways – cultural differences, language differences, a...
Post a Comment
Read more