This Fun iPhone Feature Turns Your Pet Into a Cute Live Sticker

While iOS 18 is set to bring a lot of new features to Messages on your iPhone, like more Tapbacks and RCS support, the tech giant made it easy to turn your photos into stickers in iOS 17. The feature is called Live Stickers and it lets you turn photos of your pets, family and friends into stickers to send to others in Messages.

Live Stickers are an evolution of the tap-and-lift photo feature introduced in iOS 16, which lets you cut out the backgrounds of photos and live photos. This iOS 17 feature lets you add effects to the cut-out images and store the stickers in the new app drawer in Messages.

Here’s how you can take your pictures and make them into stickers to send in Messages and other apps.

How to make Live Stickers in iOS 17

1. Open your Photos app.
2. Tap the photo you want to turn into a Live Sticker.
3. Tap the photo again to enter full-screen mode.
4. Tap and hold the item in the photo you want to turn into a sticker.
5. Tap Add Sticker.

Five pictures of a brown and white dog — Make sure you select the folded-over circle (selected above) to create your own stickers.

Screenshot by Zach McAuliffe/CNET

Your Live Sticker will be added to the Stickers drawer automatically, and you’ll be given the options to Rearrange, Add Effect or Delete your Live Sticker within the Stickers drawer. Tapping Add Effect will let you put an effect on your sticker, like a white outline to make it look even more like a sticker.

According to Apple, you can use your new Live Sticker anywhere you can access emoji, including in other apps and between other Apple devices that aren’t running iOS 17. I tried to use a Live Sticker on the messaging app Slack and my sticker was given a white background. I also couldn’t access my Live Stickers in some third-party apps, like TikTok, so you might run into some issues when using your Live Stickers outside of Apple apps and devices.

For more on iOS 17, here’s our iOS 17 cheat sheet. You can also check out everything the company announced at WWDC 2024 and all the features coming in iOS 18.