Decorate Your Photos with Stickers and Genmoji

With all the different stickers, emoji, and Genmoji in the Messages app on iOS 18, you might often want to take them out of the app and use them elsewhere—perhaps on a photograph you’ve taken. That’s exactly what you can do with stickers! Maybe you’ve got a photo of your dog and want to put a little bow on its collar, or perhaps you want to place a locket flying through the sky above you. Or maybe you just want to add a nice warm hat to yourself in a picture.

In fact, that’s exactly what I’m going to do, because I was freezing when this picture was taken in London last week, and I wish I’d had a warm hat for that moment! All I’m going to do is edit the photo as normal by tapping the Edit button, and then on this screen, I’ll tap the pencil icon at the top, which brings up the markup drawing tools.

From here, you’ll see the little toolbar of different drawing tools, but we don’t actually want any of those. Instead, we’ll use the Plus button on the far-right-hand side. From here, simply tap on Add Sticker. This brings up the same interface you get in the Messages app, where you can choose emoji, stickers, and Genmoji. In fact, you can see my Genmoji here already—I made these in Messages earlier. I quite like this teal hat; it feels very on-brand for me. I can simply tap on it, and it will place it on top of my image just like you’d expect.

Of course, I can use the little dots in the corner to make it bigger or smaller, and I can use two fingers to rotate the sticker as well. There’s no limit to how many stickers you can put on a photo, so I can add another one really quickly—perhaps this teal jumper. Again, I can resize it to fit the image. But on this one, I don’t like how it looks—it’s obvious it’s a sticker, and you can’t see my neck going through the jumper. It looks a bit fake, so I can easily delete it by tapping on it once and pressing Delete.

When I’m finished with my picture, I press Done at the top, which saves the stickers onto the photo. When I share that photo far and wide, it will have my chosen stickers on top. If I ever want to revert the photo back to its original version, it’s just as easy. I can go into the Photos app, press the three dots in the top corner, and select Revert to Original. Just like that, the photo will go back to how it was when I first took it, with no stickers left.

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