I've always been fascinated by what the terminal can do — from games to music players to code highlighters.

So I built a photo viewer that runs completely in the terminal using ANSI color blocks to render images. It’s written in raw C and is around 300kb. Surprisingly, it can handle images up to 4K quite decently.

I originally built it to run on older hardware and on mobile via Termux, but it turned out quite usable even on modern systems.

It’s not meant to replace GUI image viewers, but more like a tree or bat – a small, quick tool to view images directly from the terminal.

Curious to hear your thoughts. Source code and demo: (GitHub link in first comment to respect HN rules.)