How to Turn Vertical Photos into WhatsApp Stickers (512 512 WebP, Under 100 KB)

Turingna Zhang — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 04:18:02 +0000

Every phone gallery is full of tall photos — your cat mid-yawn, a birthday cake, a friend pulling a face. WhatsApp stickers are square. That mismatch is the entire job: get a 9:16 photo onto a 512×512 canvas without losing the subject, keep the file under 100 KB, and save it as a WebP that WhatsApp will actually accept.

In my last post I covered the transparent-WebP basics. This one is the photo-specific workflow — the exact steps I use to go from a portrait photo to a sticker in about two minutes, with Python and Pillow.

What WhatsApp actually checks

Check	Requirement
Format	WebP (static or animated)
Dimensions	exactly 512 × 512 px
File size	≤ 100 KB static (animated ≤ 500 KB)
Pack	up to 30 stickers, no mixing animated and static

Miss any of these and the sticker importer rejects the file. These are WhatsApp's official requirements from their FAQ and their open-source sample project, so there's no version of "it worked on my phone" that skips them.

For tall photos the square canvas is the real problem, and you have two options:

Crop — the photo fills the frame, but you lose the top and bottom (usually the subject's ears or feet).
Pad — the whole photo survives, with transparent bands added on two sides.

For anything with faces, pad. A sticker that cuts off half a face gets saved exactly once.

Step 1 — fit the photo onto the square canvas

from PIL import Image

def to_canvas(src: str, dst: str) -> None:
    canvas = Image.new("RGBA", (512, 512), (0, 0, 0, 0))  # fully transparent
    photo = Image.open(src).convert("RGBA")
    photo.thumbnail((500, 500))          # keeps aspect ratio, fits inside 500×500
    x = (512 - photo.width) // 2
    y = (512 - photo.height) // 2
    canvas.paste(photo, (x, y), photo)   # third arg = use alpha as mask
    canvas.save(dst, "WEBP", quality=90)

to_canvas("portrait.jpg", "sticker.webp")

Two details that matter:

Leave a few pixels of breathing room (hence 500, not 512) — stickers that touch all four edges look cramped in the picker.
paste(..., photo) uses the photo's alpha as a mask. Drop that third argument and you paste a black rectangle instead.

Step 2 (optional) — cut the background out

Padded photos look fine, but the classic sticker look is a floating subject. rembg does that in one line:

pip install rembg

from rembg import remove

photo = Image.open("portrait.jpg")
cutout = remove(photo)   # first run downloads a ~170 MB model, then it's fast

If the cutout blends into dark chat backgrounds, give it a thin white edge first:

from PIL import ImageOps
cutout = ImageOps.expand(cutout, border=8, fill=(255, 255, 255, 255))

Then run the same to_canvas paste logic on cutout instead of the raw photo.

Step 3 — stay under 100 KB

WhatsApp's limit is 100 KB (102,400 bytes) per static sticker. WebP quality is the dial to turn:

from pathlib import Path

def save_small(canvas: Image.Image, dst: str) -> None:
    for quality in range(90, 30, -10):
        canvas.save(dst, "WEBP", quality=quality)
        if Path(dst).stat().st_size <= 100 * 1024:
            return
    raise ValueError("still over 100 KB at quality 30 — shrink the image and retry")

Photos usually land between quality 60 and 80. If even quality 30 is too heavy, the photo is too busy — crop tighter or scale it down before padding.

Step 4 — get it into WhatsApp

The importer flow doesn't accept loose files, so use any sticker-maker app that imports your WebP files, or WhatsApp's own sample project if you want to self-host a pack. A pack of 3–30 stickers works best, and it shows up in your sticker tray.

One more thing: the same file doubles as a Telegram sticker — Telegram wants one side exactly 512 px and accepts PNG or WebP up to 512 KB. Make it once, use it twice.

Or skip the conversion entirely

If you'd rather grab stickers that already pass every check: FunnieStickers is a free library of 192 of them — all 512×512 WebP, all under 100 KB, no sign-up, click any sticker to download. The cat and Christmas sets are good starting points if you want something seasonal in the tray before you finish making your own.

Thanks for reading — feedback welcome in the comments.

Make a transparent WebP that WhatsApp and Telegram will accept as a sticker

Turingna Zhang — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 14:51:19 +0000

A sticker that looks fine on your desktop often fails the moment you try to add it to a chat app. WhatsApp wants a square WebP. Telegram wants the same shape and a transparent background. Discord is happier with a smaller PNG. If you only have a JPEG with a white box around the cat, none of those apps will treat it as a sticker.

This is the file spec I use, and a short Python path to produce it. No account, no design tool.

The spec that actually gets accepted

Static stickers, not animated:

App	File	Size	Notes
WhatsApp	WebP	512×512	Static sticker pack limit is 100KB per sticker
Telegram	WebP or PNG	512×512	One side must be 512px; transparent background
Discord	PNG	about 320×320	Emoji/sticker slot is small; a 512 file also works, but 320 is the one I export for chat

If you keep one master, keep the 512×512 transparent WebP, then export the 320 PNG from it. Do not start from a screenshot.

What breaks the upload

A white or colored background. The app draws a rectangle, and the sticker looks pasted on.
Text smaller than the face. At thumbnail size the letters disappear, and the joke goes with them.
A wide image squeezed into a square. Crop first, then resize.
A 2000px PNG renamed to .webp. The extension is not the format.

Convert one image

I use Pillow. Install it once:

pip install pillow

from PIL import Image

src = Image.open("cat.png").convert("RGBA")

# Crop to the non-transparent pixels so a loose canvas does not shrink the face.
bbox = src.getbbox()
if bbox:
    src = src.crop(bbox)

side = max(src.size)
canvas = Image.new("RGBA", (side, side), (0, 0, 0, 0))
canvas.paste(src, ((side - src.width) // 2, (side - src.height) // 2), src)

web = canvas.resize((512, 512), Image.Resampling.LANCZOS)
web.save("cat-512.webp", format="WEBP", quality=80, method=6)

png = canvas.resize((320, 320), Image.Resampling.LANCZOS)
png.save("cat-320.png", format="PNG", optimize=True)

print("webp bytes", len(open("cat-512.webp", "rb").read()))

If the printed byte count is over 100000, lower quality to 70 and run it again. WhatsApp rejects a static sticker above 100KB even when the dimensions are right.

Check the file before you send it

Open the WebP on a dark page and a photo. You should see the character, not a box. Then check the header so you know it is really WebP:

print(open("cat-512.webp", "rb").read(12))
# b'RIFF....WEBP'

That is the whole pipeline: crop to the visible pixels, pad to a square, resize to 512, export WebP under 100KB, and keep a 320 PNG beside it.

I publish a free set already exported this way, including cat and Christmas reactions, at FunnieStickers. The published library is 192 stickers. The cat tray is here and the Christmas tray is here. Same files: 512 WebP for WhatsApp and Telegram, 320 PNG for Discord, no sign-up.

If you only need the method, the script above is enough. If you do not want to convert anything, the library is the shortcut.

DEV Community: Turingna Zhang