Turn Your Pet Photos Into Custom iPhone Stickers

We all love our pets, and what better way to share that love than by turning their cutest and funniest moments into custom emoji and stickers? Thanks to a clever iPhone feature, you can easily lift your furry friend right out of a photo and add them to your personal sticker collection.

Apple introduced Live Stickers with the release of iOS 17. This feature is a direct evolution of the subject isolation tool introduced in iOS 16, which allowed you to copy subjects from photos. Now, you can save those cutouts of pets, friends, and family to use as unique stickers in your conversations.

How to Create Your Custom Stickers

Creating a sticker from one of your photos is a simple, four-step process:

1. Open the Photos App: Navigate to your photo library on your iPhone.
2. Select Your Photo: Tap on the picture you want to transform.
3. Isolate the Subject: Press and hold on the pet, person, or object you want to make into a sticker. You'll see a white glowing outline appear around it.
4. Save Your Sticker: A menu will pop up. Simply tap Add Sticker to save it to your collection.

Make sure you select the folded-over circle (the sticker icon) to view your new emoji.

Customizing and Using Your New Stickers

Once your sticker is created, it's added to your Stickers drawer, which is accessible from your emoji keyboard. If you tap and hold the new sticker in the drawer, you get options to Rearrange your collection, Delete it, or Add Effect. The 'Add Effect' option is particularly neat, as it allows you to add a classic white outline, making it look even more like a traditional sticker.

To use your creation, just open an app like Messages, tap the emoji icon on your keyboard, and then tap the sticker icon (it looks like a folded-over circle) to see and select your custom-made stickers.

Where Can You Use Live Stickers?

According to Apple, your new Live Stickers should be available anywhere you can access your emoji keyboard. The feature works seamlessly within Apple’s own apps like iMessage. However, in practice, you might find that there are some limitations. Some users have reported that their custom stickers do not appear in certain third-party apps, such as Slack or TikTok. So, while you can fill your iMessage conversations with endless cute pictures of your pet, their availability might be more limited elsewhere.