Getting your ASCII on with Flickr - Nihilogic

Getting your ASCII on with Flickr - Nihilogic

The Flickr search part is pretty straight forward. A single request is sent, calling the "flickr.photos.search" method. We then get a list of photos from Flickr, but we can't access the data in these directly due to the same-origin policy of the Canvas element. To get around this, we're using a small proxy script (written in PHP) that does nothing other than retrieve the image file and pass it straight through to the browser.

The image is then painted (and downscaled since we're not using all pixels) on a hidden Canvas element, the image data is retrieved using getImageData() and each pixel in the image is analyzed. The brightness of the pixel is calculated using a simple RGB to brightness formula and this level of brightness is then mapped to a list of characters selected for their varying apparent brightness. The list used here is [ .,:;i1tfLCG08@] for black/white output and [ CGO08@] for colored output.

jsAscii - ASCII art from images with Javascript and Canvas - Nihilogic
tag: ascii, asciified