I was recently texting back and forth with a friend and she did something that surprised me: She attached a tiny picture of her cat on top of my message! How did she do that and how can I do the same?
You’re talking about something that Apple introduced quite a few years ago on the iPhone, actually, called “stickers”. They first showed up in 2016 but aren’t widely used since they aren’t visible and immediately obvious within the Messages program. It’s too bad, because they’re quite fun and let you essentially have the equivalent of emoji tap-back responses, but with your own images rather than standard smileys, etc.
Working with Stickers does require a two-step process, however, so you’ll need to start out with a couple of photos you have where the person, pet, or object is visible and easily differentiated from the background of the image. Once you extract that element, it not only is available forever on your iPhone, but it’ll sync with your Mac systems too and show up there for even more fun.
TURN A PHOTO ELEMENT INTO A STICKER
The first step is to find a photo. You can use your own or you can go to a site like Pexels.com or even Google Image Search to find something suitable. I just happen to have grabbed this image of a very cute dog running with a soccer ball from Pexels:
Cute, right? And just easily enough to differentiate from the background that it’s going to work great. To turn the dog into a sticker, tap and hold on an element of the photo until you see a sort of rainbow glow around it, then lift up your finger. It’s a cool animated effect, and it looks kinda like this:
You can tell it worked by the tiny pop-up menu. Yes, you really can “Look Up” that element too; in this case Photos will try to identify the dog in the selected portion of the image. For our purposes, however, tap on “Add Sticker” instead. You’ll be presented with the new sticker and any others you have previously saved:
It’s added as a Sticker, but for maximum fun, tap on “Add Effect” because you can apply some basic transformations to make it even more memorable…
Along the bottom are: Original, Outline, Comic, Puffy, and Shiny. Tap on each to see how it changes the image. I like Outline, so that’s the one I’ve selected. A tap on “Done” and it’s ready to go!
ADDING A STICKER TO YOUR TEXT MESSAGE
Stickers are generally added to someone else’s message (though you can add it to your own if you want). It’s easy. In Messages on the iPhone find a message from a friend with an iPhone. You can tell, their messages are in blue bubbles, indicating that they too are using iMessage. Find one and then tap-and-hold your finger on it until the tap-back list appears:
Along the top are the usual tap-back emoji, but the bottom menu offers Reply, Add Sticker, Copy, Translate (very helpful!), and a More… option that lets you delete specific messages as desired. Tap on “Add Sticker” and the library of all Stickers you’ve created is shown:
Soccer pup is looking good, so I’m going to tap on it. It immediately is attached to the message I’m answering (“I’m excited to see…”) and is sent:
Quite fun, right? Remember, I said this worked across Apple devices, so when I review this text chat on my MacBook Pro, it looks even more fun because the other person has responded with a Sticker of their own:
Quite amusing!
WHAT ABOUT FRIENDS WITH ANDROID PHONES?
Since Android doesn’t use the same iMessage encrypted messaging protocol, those don’t work the same and just become regular images. You can’t find Stickers by tapping and holding on the message either, it’s accessible from the menu off the “+” symbol to the left of the message input box. You can send it, it’ll look like this:
You can see soccer dog has been turned into an image. On the Android phone, it comes in looking like this:
Not a bad result given that it’s incompatible, but worth knowing that Stickers work waaaayyyy better when you’re chatting with other iPhone users!
Pro Tip: I’ve been writing tutorials for the Apple iPhone since they were first released. Please check out my extensive iPhone help area for oodles of useful content.