tiv is an interesting tool to view image in your terminal if you have 256 colors support. It is written in Perl and requires ImageMagick (It can also generate from raw image if you have ufraw installed).

Here is a sample of this blogs logo:

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-Fea6ur3pC6s/SzUxVJqdTRI/AAAAAAAACZA/LVQuw14euvc/s640/2009-12-26--05%253A36%253A16_1468x771.png

Note that you have to specify the width (-w) of your terminal and the path to the image file (-f) at least.

You can save it to file by running:

tiv -w $COLUMNS -h $LINES -f /path/to/image.jpg > result

and run:

cat result

to view it later. Perhaps this is a new way that you can send your Happy New Year card to your friends?