Photo Booth

An ASCII art studio on the desktop — shoppers turn a photo or a camera shot into ASCII art and save it.

PHOTOBOOTH.EXE is an ASCII art studio. Shoppers open a photo, or take one with their camera, turn it into ASCII art with presets, sliders and effects, then save it as a picture. It's there for fun: a reason to stay, play and share.

Everything happens on the shopper's own device. The photo is never uploaded anywhere, and the window says so.

Adding it

In the Desktop section, Add block → Photo Booth icon. On a computer it sits at the top of the games' huddle in the bottom-right corner. On a phone or tablet it's tucked at the right end of the bottom row, next to the Games cell, away from the media icons.

Setting	Default
Label	Photo Booth	The icon's name
Put your store's name on saved pictures	on	Your store's name, small, in the bottom corner of every saved picture, so shared pictures point back to you

The studio's code only loads the first time someone opens the window, so it doesn't slow your store down.

What shoppers can do

Getting a picture in

• Open photo… picks a photo from the device. On a computer they can also drag a photo onto the picture.

• Camera turns on the front camera with a live ASCII preview. Snap! — or a tap on the picture itself — takes the shot, with a flash and a shutter click. Stop camera turns it off. The camera also stops when the window closes.

• The camera, Snap and Save buttons sit right under the picture. On a phone the picture and those buttons stay pinned at the top while shoppers scroll through the controls, so they always see what each change does. On a tablet or computer the controls sit beside the picture.

• Every picture comes out square, like a photo-booth print: the middle of the photo is used, so a tall phone shot isn't a strip.

• Before they choose anything, the window shows your store's name over a setting sun and a grid running to the horizon, as ASCII art.

Presets

One click for a whole look: Classic, Newspaper, Matrix, Neon, Name tag (the picture drawn with your store's name), Sketch, VHS, Thermal, Rainbow, Blueprint, Night vision, Pop art and Old film. The Surprise me button under them rolls a random look every press.

Controls

Group	Controls
Characters	Set: Classic, Detailed (70 characters), Minimal, Blocks, Bars, Braille, Circles, Dots, Binary, Hex, Money, Hearts, Stars, Arrows, the letters of your store's name, or their own characters. Size: 30 to 200 characters across
Picture	Brightness, Contrast, Colour depth (in full colour), Outlines (off, on, or outlines only), Invert, Mirror, Dither
Colour	Scheme: White on black, Ink on paper, Terminal green, Amber, Full colour (each character takes the photo's colour), or their own ink and paper colours
Effects	Effect with an Amount slider: Rainbow, Duotone, Holographic, Thermal camera, Night vision, Vintage film, Blueprint, Pop art, Sepia, Hue shift, Posterize, Solarize, Chromatic aberration, Vignette, Film grain, Echo, Wave, Pixel glitch. Plus Glitch (torn rows, with Re-roll glitch), Scanlines and Glow

Saving

• Save picture (just Save on a phone) saves a sharp PNG, about 1,600 pixels across. On a phone this opens the share sheet, where Save Image puts it in their photos.

• Copy text copies the art as plain text, ready to paste anywhere (on a computer).

Maximise the window and the picture grows to fill the screen, with the controls down the right.

The camera needs the shopper's permission, which their browser asks for. If there's no camera, or they say no, the window suggests Open photo… instead.