Here’s How to Turn Your Favorite Pet Photo Into a Cute iPhone Emoji

Pet owners usually leap at the chance to show pictures of their furry or feathered best friends, but searching for the right photo can be annoying. Sometimes I just want to reply to a text with a quizzical head turn or a look of unabashed joy with the same ease as sending a smiley face emoji.

Case in point: my dog Cinnamon Toast Crunch. She’s brown and white and loves to go on walks, and I take every opportunity to show her to the world. And with the Live Stickers feature on my iPhone, I can turn the gallery of photos of her into emoji and stickers and send them to everyone I know.

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, by saving those cutouts as emoji and stickers of pets, family and friends, you can send endless cuteness to others.

Here’s how to transform your photos 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.

A brown and white dog on a bed. — Apple/Screenshot by CNET

Your iPhone will then add the Live Sticker to your Stickers drawer and 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 add an effect to your sticker, like a white outline, to make it look even more like a sticker.

The iPhone stickers drawer with the Add Effect, Rearrange and Delete options showing. — Apple/Screenshot by CNET

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.

The emoji keyboard open to the custom emoji and stickers menu. — Apple/Screenshot by CNET

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 what to know about iOS 26.4 and iOS 26.3. You can also check out our iOS 26 cheat sheet for other tips and tricks.