Image To Emoji Converter 🖼️➡️😀

Welcome! This website converts your images to emoji artwork. You have been using emojis to convey emotion and intention in your chats, but have you ever used emojis to encode whole images before? Well now you can!

Select an image to upload from your computer and behold! There are many rendering options to choose from. Play around with the settings and different kinds of images to see what works best. There are some example images to pick if you just want to check out what this tool does, but I would encourage you to select your own images to create something unique!

Select an image using the button above and then try some of these presets:

If you have feedback about this site or know some funny emoji related puns, please send an email to floyd at polyfloyd dot net.

About Emojis

Emojis are the little images that can be inlined in text messages. They have been around 1997 and have seen widespread adoption into pop culture. Chances are the muscle memory of your fingers knows exactly where the emoji buttons are!

Emojis are, strictly speaking, treated as text by computers contrary to looking like images themselves. Each emoji has a unique number in the Unicode specification that defines the emojis that are available to everyone. This website exploits this property to render artwork that looks like an image but is actually text, avoiding boundaries on systems that only handle text while also looking quite interesting.

Contrary to what it might seem, the word emoji bears no relation to the English word emotion. It is actually derived from the Japanese words for e (絵 / 'picture') and moji (文字 / 'character'). The word also tells on the origin of emojis, as Japanese phone manufacturers pioneered the use of little images for common expressions in 1997 already. Did you know? In 1999, an implementation of such an emoji system, that would turn out to be quite influential, took inspiration from manga, which had a distinct way of drawing certain emotions. One such manga emotion would be nervousness being drawn as drops of sweat on the face 😅. And what about the cry-laugh emoji 😂? If you are an enjoyer of manga, you are now aware of the similarities!

Nowadays, all the emojis that can be used on your devices are managed by the Unicode Consortium in the standard of the same name. Emojis are still evolving to keep up with our ever changing popular culture, so periodically the Unicode standard is updated to include new emojis. As of writing, the latest version is 14.0 which adds 🫠, 🫤 and 🫣 among others.

Usage

Image to emoji text artwork

Text can travel everywhere so your emoji artwork can find it's way into your text chats such as Whatsapp, Discord and even IRC. So use the emoji to text converter to create a text message that represents your image with just emojis.

Depending on where you would like to share this text you may want to adjust the size as to prevent the text from wrapping as that would diminish the effect.

Image to an emoji artwork in an image

Outputting the emoji artwork as an image preserves the intricacies of text spacing and sizing. What you see is what you get. The actual emojis differ between operating systems so the emoji images that are used to render your image also stay the same, regardless of where you view it.

It is also possible to alter the size of the grid, making the emojis smaller or larger. The scale option controls the size of the emojis within their space on the grid.

Image to an emoji Tweet

Twitter imposes a size limit on the messages that can be sent out to the world. The tweet option is special because it is optimized to fit an emoji artwork into a single Tweet the best way possible without exceeding the size limit.

Did you know? Twitter does not count emojis the same way as regular text! Where a maximum of 280 characters is appied, emojis are actually counted as 2 characters. So up to 140 emojis are allowed into a single Tweet.

Emoji Skin-tone Color Image

The skin tone renderer leverages the skin-tone Unicode modifier to adjust the skin-tone of a set of certain face and body part emojis. This allows an image to be rendered in a monochrome color, or, mono emoji if you will. This mode works with both photo's and cartoon-style images.

How about taking a selfie and rendering it in 👌 (ok-hand) emojis?

Emoji Half-tone Dither Image

This rendering mode works by taking a single emoji and drawing it in different sizes based on the gray scale of the image. It works really well with photo's but not with cartoons. There is no limit to the emojis you can use to render, so how about you get a little creative?

For example, use a ❤ (heart) emoji for a portrait of someone special or a 💩 (turd) for someone you dislike.

Emoji Mosaic Image

The mosaic renderer maps the colors of an image to emojis that mostly resemble the original color. It does not work that well with photo's, but it excels with cartoon-style images with wide varieties of colors. All the different emojis add a very unique style of noise to the image!

Since emoji's and their colors vary between operating systems, if you share an emoji mosaic with other people that use different operating systems the colors will therefore vary too. However, the shape is preserved and the altered colors just ads to the artistic value in my opinion 😉.

This site will attempt to guess which set of emoji's you are using and automatically select the color mapping that works best for the device you are using right now.

Emoji Colored Squares/Hearts

There are emojis that are just shapes, such as a square or heart, with variations on their color. The renderers that use squares and hearts look for the respective emoji with the color that matches the part of the image being rendered as closely as possible. There are only 9 colors, so images with a lot of color variation work best with these renderers. So upload some rainbows and unicorns!

Q & A

How can I create a custom emoji?

To create a custom emoji to send to other people, this site can not help you! When you send an emoji to someone, you do not send the actual image, but a number that represents the emoji in the Unicode specification. The Unicode consortium does allow for submissions, so perhaps apply there?

How do I save the created image so I can share it?

You may use the "Save as image" button in the bottom left of the image. If that does not work, right click the image and select "Save image as...".