Is Facebook Adding Computer Art to Make Your Photos Incredible?

New York, Jan 30 (IANS) Social networking giant Facebook and its photo and video-sharing app Instagram are reportedly set to quietly make your photos incredible by adding computer art to them.

According to The Verge, it has been discovered that for every photo you upload to Facebook or Instagram, the company quietly makes an html page that replicates that photo using ASCII or text characters that lets you blow up your images to massive scale.

Mathias Bynens, a web standards enthusiast from Belgium, noticed it and tweeted about it on Friday. "Take any Facebook/Instagram photo URL… Append '.txt' ? ASCII art … append '.html' ? colored ASCII art," he wrote in his tweet.

If you add ".html" to the end of that URL of the photo, you will get the coloured ASCII version. Similarly, If you add ".txt" to the end of that URL, you will get a black-and-white version.

"We have reached out to the company for the reasoning behind this hidden-but-cool 'feature' - there is probably some boring backend explanation," the report noted.