ASCIIFY

Turns any photo into a picture made of text characters. Two styles — one shaded for photographs, one two-tone for logos — and a slider for how wide the result should be. Copy it as text or save it straight to Photos as an image.

Five steps, each one there because the picture came out wrong without it: decode at a bounded size with the EXIF orientation applied, trim the uniform border so the subject gets the whole grid, resample to one pixel per character cell — halving the vertical resolution, since a cell is about half as wide as it is tall — measure Rec. 709 luminance and stretch the middle 96% of the tonal range, then look up a character per cell.

Copying puts two flavours on the clipboard at once: plain text in a triple-backtick fence, so chat apps render it monospaced instead of shredding the alignment, and RTF with a pinned monospace font for rich-text targets. Text wraps past roughly 100 columns, so the width slider marks that boundary and anything past it is for the image export. The engine imports no UIKit on purpose, so the same code compiles into a macOS CLI and a ramp change can be judged from the command line.

• SwiftUI
• CoreGraphics
• ImageIO
• PhotosUI
• XCUITest