Composite image of emojis you can make
You can make an emoji out of any photo, even without the new AI Genmoji feature (Picture: Getty)

People have been getting excited about a ‘hack’ to create their own emojis on iPhone.

Apple announced that you’d soon be able to use AI to make ‘genmojis’ by typing in a prompt.

The feature hasn’t been released yet, but in the meantime, the sticker function lets you make little emoji-sized images that do the job too.

To use it in iMessage, you’ll need to make sure your phone has the latest software update installed.

Then, all you need to do is save the emoji you want to create as a photo.

In the picture library, hold down on the photo until the option to ‘create sticker’ comes up.

Save the image as a sticker, which will automatically remove the background, and when you go to type text it will appear to the left in the emoji keyboard.

To avoid it showing up as a large sticker, hold it down and drag it to the text box, where it will magically show up as a teeny tiny emoji.

How do I do it?

Using a poppy as an example (in preparation for next November), it works like this:

An emoji of a poppy
Hold down on the image to select it, and press ‘Add Sticker’ (Picture: Metro.co.uk)
Stickers on an iPhone
If you press the emoji keyboard while typing you’ll see it under stickers (Picture: Metro.co.uk)
A poppy emoji on a WhatsApp chat
You can then send it as a sticker, or drag it to the text box to use as an emoji (Picture: Metro.co.uk)
A disco ball pigeon Genmoji generated by AI on an iPhone
A new feature to dream up your own totally new emoji creations is coming soon too (Picture: Apple)

Beware: even if your emoji looks lovely on your own screen, if whoever you send it to has not updated their phone, it may not show up looking as good.

Stickers have been around since iOS 17, and you can even send a gif as a moving sticker made from a live photo too.

But a thread on how to use them as emojis has been viewed over 18 million times since it was posted on X yesterday.

The limited number of official emojis has been a complaint for many years.

This week, some would have been looking for a poppy emoji for Remembrance Day, and there has been a long-running campaign for an emoji showing afro hair.

One of the first emojis we will try and create will be a Cornish pasty, to avoid having to use a dumpling and pretend it is authentic Malcolm Barnecutt.

While we wait for Genmoji to be officially released with the Image Playground feature, it’s certainly something to have fun with.

Happy emoji-ing.

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