Last year, iOS 16 gave us the ability to crop subjects out of our photos. It was fun! But it wasn’t entirely clear what you should do with them. That changes in iOS 17, which is still in public beta right now. You can download it now or wait until the full release this fall, but either way, you’ll find a great way to use your photo cutouts: turn them into stickers.
I know. I was also skeptical. But you have to trust me on this: the stickers in iOS 17 are well worth the money, especially in iMessage. You’re going to thrill and impress all your friends when you turn a grumpy image of your cat into a tapback reaction, and they’ll all want to know how you did it. You can tell them we told you, or just keep it to yourself and take all the credit as some kind of Apple Genius Bar genius. No judgement.
Here’s how to do it. (I followed these steps on an iPhone 13 Mini running the iOS 17 developer beta.)
You can retrieve your stickers at any time using the Apple iOS keyboard. Just tap on the smiley icon where you access the emoji and scroll to the left of the frequently used panel. There you will find all the stickers you have used recently, as well as a shortcut to access all your stickers. Just tap the label you want to use, but keep in mind that outside of iMessage, they’ll only appear as PNG images. The best way to use them is in the walled garden of Apple’s messaging app:
