First of all, let’s see what a picture looks like in plain ASCII format.

 

Looks pretty cool, right? If you want to get a digital copy of any photos from Facebook and Instagram that open to the public. Here is how you can do it.

How to do it on Facebook

1. Find a picture that can be publicly viewed, which could be challenge actually.

2. When you find one, right-click the picture and choose option “Open image in a new tab” from the context menu.

3. When the image opens up in the new tab, look at the Url in the address bar that ends with the format of the photo, such as .jpg, .png, etc. Add “.html” at the end of the Url right after the format of the picture, like below.

4. Hit Enter and see what happens.

Note that if you see a series of strings after the format of the photo, that means the picture is not for public. You cannot turn a private photo in digital format on Facebook.

How to do it on Instagram

I am showing you how in Google Chrome as it has a nicely built-in Developer Tools we are going to use.

1. Find a picture that you want to turn in digital, right-click on the picture and choose Inspect. The developer tools panel opens up at the bottom of the page.

2. Expand the <div> tag above the one that is highlighted, and double-click the link in the <img> tag to highlight the entire Url of the image. Then drag the highlighted Url and drop it to the current page to show the full image.

3. Then replace everything after the picture format with “.html“, like below.

4. Hit Enter and here we go.

Now once you are on the digital version of the image page, press Ctrl + S to save the file to your local drive.