It’s been discovered that Facebook have a cool secret feature where it will create ASCII art from any of your public photos.

This only works with public photos, so a good example to try this with is your profile picture as these photos are always public.

Browse to your photo albums, look in your “Profile Pictures” album, choose a photo then use the right-click menu to grab the image url, which will look something like this:

https://scontent-lhr3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xtl1/t31.0-8/11856255_10155869982660632_3455759563649364074_o.jpg

Add “.html” on to the end of this url to see the full colour ascii rendering of this photo:

https://scontent-lhr3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xtl1/t31.0-8/11856255_10155869982660632_3455759563649364074_o.jpg.html

Or add “.txt” to the url to get the black and white version:

https://scontent-lhr3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xtl1/t31.0-8/11856255_10155869982660632_3455759563649364074_o.jpg.txt

I’m not quite sure why Facebook are doing this, I can’t imagine any practical use so I think it must just be a cool feature for people who are interested in digging deeper into the way Facebook works.