Facebook's Little Secret: How To Access Lo-Fi ASCII Versons Of All Your Facebook And Instagram Photos

Instagram and its parent, Facebook, have been hiding a little gem from their users, which one self-proclaimed web standards fanatic made the discovery and shared it with everyone on Twitter. Mathias Bynens tweeted on Jan. 27 that he discovered the two social media networks have been secretly creating American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) versions of uploaded photos and gave instructions on how to access them.

Neither Facebook nor Instagram has said anything about Bynens' discovery so no one is exactly sure why the two sites are creating text versions of everyone's photos. However, it cannot be denied that the ASCII versions, though less detailed, are still cool.

Take a look at a photo of one of Mathias' followers after it underwent an ASCII makeover.

The steps are simple. All anyone has to do is follow Bynens' instruction in his tweet.

In case you need a more detailed instruction, we've got you covered. According to the instruction, all you have to do is to open up any photo in Facebook or Instagram and get its specific Uniform Resource Locator (URL) and type .html or .txt, depending on whether you want a simple text output or a colored one, at the end of the link.

There are some who said the instruction did not work for them but, according to other Twitter users who followed Bynens' instructions, the instruction only works for photos that are publicly available in both social media networks.

The user @Serpa, however, found out that just adding .txt or .html on specific photo links does not always work on Facebook. He discovered that the ASCII version of photos can only be accessed by users if the Content Delivery Network (CDN) that was used to upload the photo to Facebook is Akamaihd.net and not Facebook's static CDN.