// the find
notwaldorf/emojillate
:camera::art: Pixellate an image into emoji
A 2016 Polymer/Web Components toy that converts an uploaded image into a grid of emoji characters by sampling pixel colors and mapping them to the closest matching emoji. It's a fun weekend hack from a Google Chrome engineer, not a library or tool you'd integrate into anything.
The core color-matching idea is clever — sampling canvas pixel data and doing nearest-neighbor matching against a precomputed emoji color table is the right approach for this kind of thing. The output being plain text is genuinely useful; you can paste the result anywhere without worrying about image hosting. The live resolution slider gives immediate feedback, which is the right UX for a tool like this.
Built on Polymer 1.x and Bower, both of which have been dead for years — you can't run this locally without fighting deprecated tooling. Last commit was 2021 (itself a stale 5-year gap from the original 2016 work), and there's no sign of a modern rewrite. The emoji color mapping hasn't been updated for the ~3000 emoji added since 2016, so results are skewed toward whatever was in the Unicode 9 set. No API, no npm package — it's a single-page demo with no path to embedding this in your own project.