Make a sticker from any photo

WhatsApp publishes its sticker requirements in the developer guide on its official GitHub. A sticker is exactly 512 × 512 pixels with a transparent background, saved as WebP (sticker apps on iPhone may also use PNG). A still sticker can be at most 100 KB, and WhatsApp recommends an 8 px white stroke so the art stays readable on dark, light and patterned chat backgrounds.

Tip: To send a single sticker you don’t need a pack. WhatsApp’s own sticker maker, on iPhone and on Android since August 2024, turns a picture from your gallery into a sticker, so save the PNG and choose it there.

1. Save the full-size PNG. It is trimmed to the sticker’s edge and keeps up to 2048 px on its long side, more than a 1080 × 1920 Story needs.
2. Open the Story editor, tap the sticker icon and choose the photo sticker, then pick the PNG from your photos. Its transparent background stays transparent.
3. On iPhone you can instead press Copy image here, then open the Story editor: Instagram usually offers to add the copied picture as a sticker.
4. Pinch to resize it, and keep it clear of the top and bottom of the screen, where Instagram’s own buttons sit.

Instagram has a built-in Cutouts sticker too, added in May 2024, which makes a sticker from a photo or video in your camera roll and picks out the subject automatically. This tool lets you choose exactly what stays, adds the white outline and shadow, and gives you a file you can reuse in Reels covers, WhatsApp, slides or a shop listing.

The model is SlimSAM, a slimmed-down version of the Segment Anything model, and it answers taps rather than guessing the subject. It looks at your photo at 1024 px on the long side and returns a 256 × 256 mask. The tool smooths that edge to the pixel, drops stray specks and fills pinholes, but loose hair, fur and the rim of a glass won’t be exact. The white outline hides small misses; for a stubborn edge, switch to the brush and paint the last bit by hand.

• Works best on one clear subject: a person, a pet, a mug on a table, a product held up to the camera.
• One tap often selects a whole object. If a part is missing, tap it too; if a hand holding a product comes along, switch to Remove and tap the hand.
• Struggles with subjects the same colour as the background, with glass and smoke, and with very small things in a wide shot.
• Takes photos of up to 40 MB. Anything above 16 megapixels is scaled down first, and HEIC photos may not open outside Safari, so use JPEG or PNG.

Privacy works like this: the cut-out, the outline and the files are all made in your browser, using your graphics chip through WebGPU where the browser offers it and WebAssembly where it doesn’t. The model is downloaded from Hugging Face once. Safari can’t write WebP files by itself, so there a small WebP encoder (about 120 KB) is downloaded the first time you save the WhatsApp version. Your photo is never uploaded.