Facebook secretly makes kickass ASCII art of every picture you upload

Here’s a fun, amazing fact about Facebook: every time you upload a picture, the service is automatically generating an ASCII art version of your photos.

All you need to do is grab the link to an image on your page by right clicking on it, then clicking ‘copy image URL.’ Paste that into your address bar, then add ‘.html’ on the end.

You’ll get a full color ASCII art version of your photo — it works for Instagram shots too. If you want a black and white version, add .txt to the end instead.

We’ve noticed it doesn’t work on every photo out there, so if it fails for you, try another picture — the photo needs to be public, or it won’t work.

It isn’t clear why Facebook is doing this — or if it was intended to be public, but we’ve reached out for further information.

Spotted via Mathias Bynens on Twitter