7 Ways to Use Custom Slack Emojis at Work

For more Custom Slack Emojis, read The Top 100 Custom Slack Emoji You Absolutely, Positively Need and More Slack Emojis You Need to Succeed as a Company. We’re back with a handy guide on how to level up your Custom Slack Emoji usage at work. If you love expressing yourself with emoji, you’ll enjoy this guide. Let’s get to it.

1. How To Make Your Own Slack Emoji

Slack has made this pretty simple. In the message field, click the smiley icon to open the emoji library pop up. Click the “Add Emoji” button at the bottom.

A modal will open where you can upload a new emoji: select an image file from your computer and name the new emoji.

Don’t worry about the image size because Slack will now automatically resize your image if the file size is too large. Here’s another great step-by-step on how to add your own emojis to slack.

Optimize Your Custom Emoji

Square images work best, so if you can, use an image editor (like Pixlr, or Preview if you’re on a Mac) to crop your image. If you’re good at editing photos, create a transparent background by removing all the parts of the image except the part you want for the emoji. We recommend using the magic wand tool in Preview or Photoshop.

2. Download Our Top 130+ Custom Emoji and Upload to Your Slack

1. Enter your email below to download the custom Slack emoji file.

2. Unzip the file on your computer. 3. Install this Google Chrome plugin which will allow you to upload ALL of these emoji at one time.

4. Next, visit your Slack’s customization area in Chrome, which you can get to by typing in [insert your channel name here].slack.com/customize/emoji in the URL field of your browser. Or, you can click on the name of your organization in the top left, then click “Customize Slack”. This will open a page in your browser.

5. Use the Chrome plugin to drag and drop all of the emoji from the unzipped folder to the plugin upload area, and it will upload everything to your Slack. (If you don’t want certain emoji uploaded, delete them from the unzipped file first.) Voilà!

Using Your New Emoji in Slack

When you’re ready to use a new custom Slack emoji, type a colon then the emoji name and the matching emoji will appear:

Or, click the smiley face in the message bar to open the emoji library pop up. Then click the Slack icon in the far right to view all the custom emoji in your organization. You can also use the search bar to search for a specific emoji.

3. Find an Emoji Faster Using an Alias

If you can’t remember how to access your favorite emoji using the keyboard shortcut, you can manually add an emoji alias that is easy for you to remember. The alias will exist in addition to the current emoji name. We found this helpful tip in Top 9 Tips and Tricks for Slack Emojis:

1. Click on your name on the top left of the Slack app below the organization name, then click “Customize Slack”.
2. Click “Add Alias”.

3. Choose the emoji you want to add an alias for.

4. Enter the alias name and click save. If you run into any issues adding an alias, contact your admin.

4. Use Custom Emoji to Convey Meaning Without Typing

How To Add an Emoji as Your Slack Status

1. From a computer, click your name in the top left below the organization name. Or, use the keyboard shortcut shift-command-up arrow-Y. On mobile apps, click the 3 dots.

2. Click “Edit status”. 3. Click the emoji to the left of “What’s your status?” and set your preferred emoji!

4. From this modal, you can also set a time for the status to clear (or not clear!).

React with an Emoji to Respond to a Message Instead of a Thread of Comments

Is Slack becoming too distracting? In this super helpful Slack focus guide,  Jory MacKay suggests using a “reacji”, which is an emoji used to react to a message. This declutters channels of written messages while still getting the job done.

You can also use a poll to gather information such as what’s for lunch:

Or your status: You can also use a custom emoji with a company-wide universal meaning to react to typical workplace scenarios. Here’s one of our own (which is included in the custom download slack emoji pack). It’s called, “heal up bud”, and we use it to bestow best wishes on someone who is sick.

Advanced Slack Emoji Tips and Tricks

Already mastered these emoji tips and tricks? The next section is for all you Slack emoji pros out there!

5. Save Your Team’s Custom Slack Emoji in a Zip File

Do you want to download your team’s entire emoji collection into a zip file to use in another Slack? Good news! If you have a Slack API token, you can easily do this. If you don’t, check out the Slack Help Center for step-by-step instructions. You may need to have your Slack admin authorize your request. Once you’ve done that, you can use your Terminal to run this Ruby script that will download and zip all of the custom emojis your team has ever uploaded!

6. Calculate Your Slack Organization’s Most Used Emoji Reactions

Curious about what emoji reactions your company uses the most? Slack has an API for that as well. Here’s a Ruby script we used to find our most-used emoji reactions in our #watercooler channel since last year. Make sure you have Ruby installed on your computer and run ruby reactions.rb from the Terminal.

Note: Restrict it to 500 messages per batch since 1,000 will often cause a timeout.

7. Slack Emoji Resources

Can’t find the emoji you’re looking for? Here’s an emoji cheat sheet for all of the standard emoji. Looking for more custom emojis? Here are a few great sites we found.

• Emojipacks has an extensive collection of custom emojis for purchase (some packs are free!)
• DiscordEmoji has a custom emoji maker.

Ready to start using Custom Slack emoji at work? Download a zip file of a few of our favorites to get started.

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