02-06-2025
How to Turn Your Pet's Pictures Into Emoji on Your iPhone
I love my dog, Cinnamon Toast Crunch. She's brown and white and precious, and I want to show her to the world. And Apple makes that easy with a feature called Live Stickers, which turns photos of her into emojis and stickers I can text to others
Apple introduced Live Stickers in iOS 17 as an evolution of the tap-and-lift feature from iOS 16, which lets you cut out subjects from photos and Live Photos. Now, you can save those cutouts as emojis and stickers. That way, you can turn photos of your pets, family and friends into stickers to send to others in Messages.
Read more: Everything You Need to Know About iOS 18
Here's how you can take your pictures and make them into emoji and stickers to send in Messages and other apps.
How to make Live Stickers and emoji from pictures
1. Open your Photos app.
2. Tap the photo you want to turn into an emoji or sticker.
3. Tap and hold the item in the photo you want to turn into an emoji or sticker until you see the white outline.
4. Tap Add Sticker.
Make sure you select the folded-over circle (selected above) to view your new emoji.
Apple/Screenshot by CNET
Your iPhone will then add the Live Sticker to your Stickers drawer, and it will also appear in your emoji keyboard. If you tap the new sticker, you'll be given the options to Rearrange, Add Effect or Delete it. Tapping Add Effect will let you put an effect on your sticker, like a white outline to make it look even more like a sticker.
The next time you go into Messages, you can use your new sticker as an emoji by tapping the emoji keyboard in the bottom-left corner of your screen, tapping the folded-over circle and tapping the emoji you want to use.
According to Apple, you can use your new Live Sticker anywhere you can access emoji. I tried to use my Live Stickers on the messaging app Slack, but they wouldn't appear in the app. I also couldn't access my Live Stickers in some third-party apps, like TikTok, so you might run into some issues when using your Live Stickers outside of Apple apps and devices.
For more iOS news, here's all the features included in iOS 18.5 and iOS 18.4. You can also check out our iOS 18 cheat sheet and what we hope to see in iOS 19.
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