All 100 ideasImages and design
#79 of 100 · Images and design
Turn a photo into art, faithfully
A converter that turns their own photo into a coloring page, pixel art, ASCII, sketch or low-poly image without AI changing the details.
Asks per year
What the askers want
- Would pay11%
- Want it local or private11%
- Object to subscriptions0%
- Want it open source or self-hosted0%
- Want AI to do it22%
Share of the 9 asks that say so, as judged by Jev.
What exists on Show HN
Built, still asked for23 Show HN launches do this job, and 9 more do part of it. People still ask, so the launches are missed, unknown, or not what they want. Ask what they’re missing before you build.
- Creating custom coloring pages from photos. Great for parents/teachers2024 · 179 pts
- I took over Painteresque, a 14 year old Objective-C app and rebuilt it2025 · 117 pts
- Gif2txt – Gif Image to Ascii Text2015 · 20 pts
- I built a tool convert any image to ASCII Art2022 · 15 pts
- Open-source pixel art editor with animation and auto-tiling tilesets2026 · 8 pts
- Image to Ascii Text – output HTML or Ansi terminal with color support2015 · 7 pts
- A Ruby gem to convert images into custom ASCII art2021 · 6 pts
- Gif2txt – Gif Image to Ascii Text2015 · 5 pts
Instead of: Primitive, DALL-E
The idea, as matched
A tool that converts a photo into a chosen art style (coloring page, pixel or sprite art, ASCII, pencil or line drawing, low-poly, dithering) while keeping the original's details instead of reinventing it.
Jev first matched 12 requests to this idea; a second reader kept 9 of 12.
Every ask, newest first
Each line is an AI paraphrase of what the writer wanted. The link goes to their own words on Hacker News.
Reader’s note. One item is a duplicate post.
- Feb 2026Asks for a good image-to-ASCII converter. Read it: a comment in “Monosketch”
- Nov 2025Asks for a tool that dithers images using named colors. Read it: a comment in “A visualization of the RGB space covered by named colors”
- Mar 2024Wants a photo-to-coloring-page tool that stays faithful to the uploaded image, without AI reinterpretation. Read it: a comment in “Show HN: Creating custom coloring pages from photos. Great for parents/teachers”
- Oct 2022Asks for an AI tool that makes dot woodcut-style prints like those in newspapers. Read it: a comment in “GitHub Copilot investigation”
- May 2022Wants a tool that turns an image into quality pixel art. Read it: a comment in “Living Worlds: 8 Bit art animated with palette cycling (2012)”
- Dec 2021Wants software that turns a picture into Street Fighter II-style sprites at various resolutions. Read it: a comment in “Street Fighter II, the World Warrier”
- May 2021Wants a tool that turns a photo into a cartoon-like drawing avatar. Read it: a comment in “Anime2Sketch: A sketch extractor for illustration, anime art, manga”
- Nov 2016Still looking for a tool that converts photos into pencil drawings. Read it: a comment in “Show HN: Primitive for macOS”
- Jan 2015Would pay for a Mac app that creates low poly art from photos. Read it: a comment in “Show HN: PolyGen App, turn gradients and photos into pretty low poly patterns”
Building this?
Read ten of the asks above first, because they say what the existing launches miss. If you ship it, post it as a Show HN so the next run of this list finds it.
Ship it like Vercel, on a server you own
This site runs on ShipTiffin. A push to GitHub deploys it, the way it would on Vercel, but the server is a Hetzner box in your own account. Postgres, sign-in, email, jobs and analytics are already on it, every project gets a hard limit, and nothing is billed by usage.
$19 a month per box, plus about $10 for the server at Hetzner. Open source, so you can also run it yourself for free.