Image to Dot Art Converter

Choose a picture and get dot art made of braille characters. Change the width and the contrast, then copy the text.

Your dot art

Choose a picture to begin.

How the converter works

Each braille character is a block of eight dots, two across and four down. The converter shrinks your picture so that every pixel matches one dot, turns it into black and white, and then writes one braille character for every block of eight pixels. A dark pixel becomes a raised dot. The width slider controls how many characters wide the result is, which also controls how much detail it can hold.

The darkness cut-off decides which pixels count as dark. Lower it for a faint, airy look and raise it to fill in more of the picture. Dithering spreads the difference between the original shade and the nearest black or white to the pixels around it, so a grey area turns into a pattern of dots instead of a flat patch. Invert flips dark and light, which helps with white drawings on a dark background.

Getting a clean result

  1. Start with a simple picture: a face close up, a silhouette, a logo or a drawing with strong lines.
  2. Crop away empty space first. Dot art has very few dots to spend, so a picture that fills the frame looks better.
  3. Try widths between twenty and forty characters for a note or a post. Very wide results are hard to paste into most chat apps.
  4. Paste into a place that keeps line breaks and uses a fixed-width font. The look may vary by device and app.
  5. Only convert pictures you have the right to use. A copy of someone else’s artwork is still a copy.

Questions people ask

Is my picture uploaded?

No. The image is read and converted by your browser on your own device, and it is not sent to a server by this tool.

Why does the result look crooked in my chat app?

Dot art relies on every character being the same width. Many chat apps use fonts where braille characters have different widths, so the lines may not line up. Try a notes app, a code block or a fixed-width font.

Which images work best?

Simple pictures with strong contrast, such as a logo, a silhouette or a face on a plain background. Detailed photos get muddy at small widths.

Why does my picture look stretched?

Braille characters are drawn with different proportions by different fonts, so a round shape can look oval. A monospace font with square-ish dots gives the most faithful result, and it may vary by device.

What is the maximum size?

The slider goes up to eighty characters across. Larger results are heavy for chat apps and bios, which often have character limits.

Processing happens in your browser. Results depend on the fonts of the app where you paste them.