One of the coolest features that I think MANY people will enjoy using this fall on iOS 17 and iPadOS 17 is the ability to create your own stickers from non-live as well as live photos.

When you go into your Photo Library to select a photo you are interested in creating a sticker for all you have to do is press down on the image (on the iPhone) or if you are using a Magic Keyboard on your iPad, hover over the image and click it…this is when the Apple Magic goes to work. The press or click emits an outlining feature that, to me, looks like lightning, tracing around the outside of the image followed by a choice to add that image as a sticker. When you press or click Add Sticker you are taken to a sticker drawer where you can, among other things, add effects to the sticker and rearrange them. I am testing this feature out with both my wife and 2 of our best friends (iPhone users) as well as my brother (not an iPhone user).

In the first developer beta only beta users could create and use stickers with each other. In beta 2, those with the beta installed are still the only ones who can create stickers however, Apple fixed things so that anyone with an iPhone can see the stickers.

I chose attempting to share stickers with my brother because I wanted to see what (if anything at all) he was getting from one operating system to another. Turns out, what he gets is interesting. He doesn’t see it as a sticker per say. What he sees is a smaller image (the size of the actual sticker an iPhone user would see) with a white background…white because the actual image was made to be a sticker.

I recently realized that the stickers you create can be rearranged within the sticker drawer. Being able to rearrange them is cool because what I am doing is creating an organizational structure where I have stickers I will just use with my brother together and stickers I will use with my wife and friends together. I wonder if, in future iterations, Apple will add a feature to this sticker drawer that would allow the user to create folders for their stickers; that would be awesome!