excel-photo

Convert any image into an .xlsx file where the image is recreated using colored Excel cells - pixel art, but it's a spreadsheet.

Install

pip install excel-photo

Usage

CLI

excel-photo input.png output.xlsx --max-dim 300 --max-colors 256

Python

from excel_photo import image_to_excel

result = image_to_excel("input.png", "output.xlsx", max_dim=300, max_colors=256)
print(result)  # {'grid_width': 300, 'grid_height': 168, 'unique_colors': 249}

Options

Notes

• 300-400 for max_dim is a sweet spot: a real quality jump, still opens smoothly in Excel. Beyond ~500-600 Excel starts feeling sluggish just from rendering that many individually-styled cells, even though the file itself stays small.
• Unused columns past the image are hidden so scrolling right stops cleanly. Rows aren't hidden the same way - Excel has no bulk-range mechanism for hiding rows, so doing this for the ~1M rows below the image would balloon the file instead of shrinking it.

License

MIT