Facebook (and its subsidiary Instagram) have a rather bizarre hidden feature. It only seems to work on public photos, but it's something like this: if you go into the code and find the image address, and it isn't garbled with a bunch of stuff after ".jpg," then you should be able to add .txt or .html after that image address to get either black and white or color ASCII art of that photo, respectively.
No one seems to know why, although Mathias Bynens was the one who discovered it, posting this tweet:
From my own trial and error, it seems (and I could be wrong) that it works if the image is public. For instance, it worked for this photo from Clickhole's Facebook account. So this:
Becomes this:
or this:
And while I couldn't get any Facebook image that I personally shared to work, I could get this Instagram photo of my dumb cat by digging through the page source code (right click, "View Page Source," searching for .jpg):
To become this:
and this:
So something is going on here! Perhaps it's a way to get images to load faster by creating a sort of dummy unicode. Perhaps it's a strange Easter Egg. Maybe it has some other reason entirely. But regardless, for now, this is a way you can mess around with your Facebook or Instagram photos to turn your dinner into alphabet soup.
Source: The Verge
