Emoji are a fun and light-hearted way to communicate, they even work across language barriers as they don’t rely on words. There are a huge number of common public emoji, but occasionally you may want more. For example, you may want emoji that humorously references a workplace in-joke or the office pet.
Thankfully Slack allows you to add your own custom emoji to your workspace. By default, any member, with the exclusion of guests, is able to add custom emoji to the workspace, although this policy may be changed by your workspace administrators.
If you’re able to add custom emoji to the workspace, you can find the button to do so in the emoji picker. To open this, click on the smiley in the bottom-right corner of the chat bar. In the bottom-left corner of the emoji picker, you should then be able to see the “Add emoji” button in the bottom left of the emoji picker.
Tip: The “Add emoji” button only appears when you’re not hovering the mouse over an emoji in the emoji picker.
In the default “Custom emoji” tab, you can upload emoji to the workspace and name them. Click “Upload image” to select a file from your hard drive.
Tip: A small preview will appear to the left of the image upload box showing how the emoji will look in both the light and dark themes.
After you upload an image, the filename will be used to suggest a name for the emoji, if you’re not happy with the generated name, click in the text box and rename it.
Tip: The emoji name you pick will be the text version of the emoji. Just like the smiling emoji can also be shown as “:smile:”, your emoji titled cat_snooze will have the text representation of “:cat_snooze:”. This text will be visible to people so don’t pick anything rude or embarrassing.
Once you’re happy with the image you’ve uploaded and the name, click “Save” to add your new emoji to the workspace.
To be able to use your custom emoji, open the emoji picker again, then either scroll to the bottom of the list, or click the Slack category icon in the top-right corner to be taken to the “Custom” section. Here you will see some default custom emoji provided by Slack, and the emoji you’ve uploaded yourself. Alternatively, you can type the text version out, surrounded by colon’s (“:”), as you type the name, Slack will make emoji suggestions that you can click to accept.
Tip: Once you type the full emoji name, including the colons on either end, the text will be replaced with the emoji.
Emoji are a light-hearted communication aide; custom ones can add that little bit of extra fun. By following the steps in this guide, you can upload and use your own custom emoji in your workspace.
Did this help? Let us know!