Graphics in TTY

Can you not run an X server on another tty and switch to it when you need to? If you have a machine next to you that is running X, then you can use X11 forwarding to have it display there.

The most direct answer is to use jp2a : JPEG to ASCII.

Maybe you can use the famous ascii-art library : libcaca. It even allows to see movie in a terminal, so it should also works for simple jpeg.

If you simply have a series of .jpeg images that you wish to display in a tty, you can use aview or asciiview. When calling asciiview with an image, it will convert the image to the .pnm format - using an external program like NetPBM or ImageMagic - before passing it to aview for displaying. The .pnm is the ascii image format used to represent the image as set of characters. To view an image in this format, simply use:

$ asciiview foo.jpeg

or to save a .pnm copy first:

$ convert foo.jpeg foo.pnm
$ aview foo.pnm

These support the driver from aalib.