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!
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 since 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 despite 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 of the origin of emojis, as Japanese phone manufacturers pioneered the use of little images for common expressions as early as 1997. 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, such as 🫠, 🫤 and 🫣.
Usage
Image to emoji text artwork
Text can travel everywhere so your emoji artwork can find its 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 so 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, but 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 in Bluesky
Bluesky imposes a size limit on the messages that can be sent out to the world. The Bluesky option is special because it is optimized to fit an emoji artwork into a single post the best way possible without exceeding the size limit.
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 photos 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 grayscale of the image. It works really well with photos 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 most closely resemble the original color. It does not work that well with photos, 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 emojis 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 add to the artistic value in my opinion 😉.
This site will attempt to guess which set of emojis 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 cannot 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?
Choose the Image output and use the "Save as image" button below the image. If that does not work, right-click the image and select "Save image as...".