Are you looking for some cool edited versions of your Facebook and Instagram photos? Guess what, some of your photos might exist as ASCII renderings and we are here to help you find them.

ASCII - Better'fly

ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange and this code is what shows texts in most devices and computers that use text. This character based code is being used by Facebook to recreate photos out of text letters and numbers and they are pretty easy to find.

Check out this photo taken from Mark Zukerbergs Instagram account of him and Kevin Systrom, Instagram cofounder, showing the original photo and the ASCII version of it.

SHOW ME HOW TO DO THIS…NOW!

As we previously said, it’s pretty easy to find those images, just add to the end of the image’s URL “.html” to get a colored imaged or “.txt” to get a black-and-white image.

Lets take this step by step:

  1. Get the image URL, which is different from the URL to the post. If you are on Facebook, right click on the image and select “copy image URL” or “open image in new tab”.
    As for Instagram, it might be a bit complicated. First, open the image then right click and select “view page source”. Once you do that a box\separate tab appears on your browser with a lot of letters and words. This box contains the URL to photo, you can easily find it if you search the page(CTRL + F) for “.jpg”
  2. Getting the ASCII format. Now that you have the URL to the image, use it to open the image. Look at the end of the URL for “.jpg” and add “.html” or “.txt” then hit enter.
  3. This might not always work. Not all images might have the ASC II rendering especially if the photos are not on public display. Moreover, if the URL has extra characters after the “.jpg”, there might not be an ASCII rendering for the photo

But the real question here is why do these photos even exist? And why aren’t users told about them by Facebook and Instagram?

Bashar Hassanieh
Better’fly