Memoji – Turn Your Selfies Into Emojis

The estimated reading time for this post is 3 minutes

If you’re a fan of emojis, you’ll enjoy Memoji, a new app that turns your selfies into emojis. If your friends are fans of emojis, you can turn their photos into emojis too.

And even if your friends aren’t fans of emojis, you can still turn their photos into emojis. Perhaps then they will become emoji fans!

Memoji is a free app for iPhone (the Android version is in the works) that turns photos of faces into emojis. The app launched on Friday and lets you choose from 11 different emojis, including happy, sad, cool, love, and everyone’s favorite: rainbow unicorn.

Use photos you already have on your phone, or take photos of yourself within the app, and turn them into emojis.

Memojis can be saved as photos, GIFs (animated images) and videos. The app lets you save these to your phone and share them on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and other social media sites. You can also send them directly to your friends in Facebook Messenger, text messages and email.

How to Use Memoji

To use Memoji, first download it free from the iTunes App Store: Memoji app. Open the app and give it permission to access your photos.

Turning your photos into emojis is easy. Tap the photo icon in the upper left corner of the screen.

Choosing a Photo

Choose from photos on your phone that show faces. The app doesn’t recognize all face photos, so if the app doesn’t recognize a face in the photo you choose, try a different photo instead.

The app only recognizes photos of human faces. If you try to use Memoji with a photo of your precious pup, you’ll get an error message that encourages you to try again with a human face.

[tip] Note to Developers: please update the app to turn dog and cat faces into emojis. [/tip]

You don’t have to choose a photo of yourself. You can have fun with photos of friends.

If you choose a photo of a group of friends, only one face in the photo will get the emoji.

Turning the Photo into an Emoji

Under the photo you will see the 11 different emojis you can use. Swipe through to choose your favorite.

Tap on the emoji to add it to the face in the photo. You can choose from:

• Laugh until you cry
• Angry
• Kiss
• Devil
• Laughing
• Sad crying
• Rainbow unicorn
• I ate (or drank) something I shouldn’t have
• Love
• Sad
• Cool

At least those are my interpretations of the emojis. Your interpretations might differ from mine.

After you tap the emoji, the face in the photo will change according to the emoji you choose. The face moves to a smile, frown or something else.

An image might be added such as tears, sunglasses, or a unicorn horn. For some emojis the facial expression changes without an image being added.

Keep tapping different emojis until you find one you like.

Saving and Sharing the Memoji

When you’ve settled on your favorite Memoji, you’ll want to save it and share it with others. Tap the arrow icon in the upper right corner of the screen.

You’ll see choices of format for saving the image as a GIF, video or image. GIF may be the most fun, but you can choose based on how you want to share the Memoji.

After you select the format, sharing and saving options will appear on the screen. You can save the image to your phone, share it to your social media accounts, add it to a text or email message, assign it to a contact and more.

A label that gives credit to the app is included in the lower right corner of the image/video. (I do hope that the ability to remove the label is added in a future update.)

Your Thoughts

Do you like emojis? Will you be creating Memojis? Which emoji is your favorite?

Share your thoughts in the Comments section below!

*Portrait image (edited) of Ginevra de’ Benci [obverse] by Leonardo da Vinci, courtesy of the National Gallery of Art