Add Your Own Emojis to ios

Trick Out Your Emojis By Adding Your Favorites Individually

Apple has given us a cool way to add our own emojis using a lesser know keyboard feature called ‘text replacement.’ It’s really easy to use and there’s no end to the creative uses that you can use this feature for.

How to Find Emojis That You Want to Add for Free

You can find a lot of great resources to use for custom emojis right in the App Store. Look for free apps that provide interesting and useful Unicode or Emoji characters. Two that I can recommend and I use personally I’ve included examples to here. They are Uniconsole keyboard and a quick sketch app called Inkboard. Inkboard also includes a keyboard with some less used characters that can make great emojis.

Adding New Emojis to ios Settings

Once you’ve installed and explored those apps or others which have helped you to find some Emojis or special characters that you’d like to use, you’re ready to learn how to add those individual characters into the ‘Text Replacement‘ area in Settings. Incidentally, what you’ll be doing may also be referred to as shortcuts or snippets.

Each emoji that you add needs to have a ‘shortcut‘ word that you’ll associate with it. When you type that shortcut word using the ios keyboard, that will trigger ios to replace the actual word you typed with the special character or emoji you’d like to save. I’ll use an example here in which I’ll add an infinity symbol. Let’s get started.

Step 1

First, type or paste the symbol or emoji into a temparay note using the Apple note app. Then select it and copy it.

Below is an  Note with several possible emojis I might use…btw the  is one emoji I added with these steps!

Above I’ve selected the ∞ symbol to add.

Step 2

Now, go to Settings – General – Keyboard – Text Replacement

Step 3

In the ‘Phrase‘ field type the shortcut phrase that you’ll enter everytime you want to add that emoji. In the ‘Shortcut‘ field paste in the emoji that you copied from  notes.

Below are some of my text replacement entries.

Text Replacement Can Be Used to Improve Productivity too…

If you look at some of my ‘text replacement’ entries in the screenshot above, you might be wondering what they mean. For example, ‘bsatips‘ and vsatips. You can used ‘text replacement’ to fix errors you might make repeatedly. In this example…I’m constantly missing the ‘v’ key when I type the name of my website…vsatips. I always hit the ‘b’ key instead. By entering ‘vsatips’ and a shortcut (bsatips) ios will automatically convert bsatips to vsatips while I’m typing. This is a great productivity tool!

Below I’ve just added the ∞ symbol as a new emoji.

What’s Next?

Now, anytime you’d like to use that emoji, just type your shortcut word and the emoji will replace the word itself. What happens if you want to type the actual word ∞ and don’t want the emoji to replace it? If you have predictive text turned on and the predictive shortcut bar on the Apple ios keyboard pulled up for use…you can just type the word infinity and you’ll see it displayed in the left hand predictive box at the top of your keyboard. Just tap on it and the word will be entered instead of the symbol. See the screenshot below.