Remember the good old days when sending an honest to goodness image over a dial-up internet connection would have taken hours, so people devised ways to arrange text to look like cartoons, landscapes, or you know… people with their clothes off? Now you can relive the fun with AsciiCamera for Android.

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This free app uses your phone’s camera to snap a photograph. But instead of just saving a JPG, AsciiCamera converts your photo into ASCII art. The result is an image made up of letters, numbers, and other text-based symbols.

You can adjust the size of your image and choose whether to save it in color or grayscale. The final image can then be saved either as an image file or as a text file. There’s also a share button built in, making it easy to share your creation with the world via email, SMS, Facebook, Twitter, or any other sharing services you happen to have installed on your phone.

AsciiCamera also lets you convert any image stored on your phone to text-based art. Just fire up the Android gallery app, find an image, and hit the share button. Choose AsciiCamera and the app will go to work converting your picture.

AsciiCamera is available as a free download from the Android Market.

You can check out a few more screenshots after the break.

Brad Linder

Brad Linder is editor of Liliputing and Mobiputing. He's been tinkering with mobile tech for decades and writing about it since...

2 replies on “AsciiCamera for Android converts snapshots to text”

  1. I love ASCII art. In the early blogs I used, I would post ASCII pictures, because the early journal app didn’t allow for even attaching pictures. The ascii art trick was fun because you had to add some markup launague to make the pictures come out correctly few people figured out how I made my text line up.

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