Keeping animated PNG iMessage stickers under 500KB
With the release of iOS 10, Apple introduced stickers in iMessage. A sticker
is a small image or animation that can be sent or placed on messages, photos
or on other stickers.
Creating a sticker pack with your own animated stickers is simple! You need an
animated PNG and
Xcode 8.
Clone this project to get started, watch Apple’s
video tutorial,
or follow the steps below.
Keeping animated stickers below the maximum size of 500KB can be
challenging. We’ll show you how you can use TinyPNG to
accomplish this! Read on!
Creating an iMessage Sticker Pack Application
First create a new Sticker Pack Application in Xcode 8. Select File > New >
Project from the menu, then choose Sticker Pack Application.
Name your project and choose a location to save it.
Adding an animated PNG to your Sticker Pack
Your project is empty after creation. If you already have an animated PNG
(APNG), you can drag and drop it to the sticker pack under
Stickers.xcstickers > Sticker Pack.
For optimal performance, Apple has added a hard file size limit of 500KB
for stickers. Xcode will warn you when you attempt to add a file that is
larger.
Making sure your stickers are below 500KB can be especially challenging for
animated stickers! Luckily you can use TinyPNG to
compress your stickers.
Compressing animated PNGs
You can compress your images in order to reduce the file size. With the
TinyPNG website you can compress APNG files for free.
This allows you squeeze every last byte out of your images and to create the
best possible stickers!
Compare before & after
The compression uses advanced techniques to compress images. The difference is
hardly noticeable but the filesize savings after compression are quite
spectacular. The APNG image of the waving panda is compressed from 1.5 MB to
492 KB. You can see there is barely a visible difference.
Note that animated PNGs are only displayed in Firefox or Safari. In Google
Chrome, Opera, Microsoft Edge and other browsers you only see the first
frame.
| Original APNG – 1.5MB |
Optimised APNG – 492KB |
 |
 |
How to reduce file size further?
If TinyPNG is not able to compress your animated PNG
below 500KB, you might have to take other steps to reduce the file size. You
may have to change your image so that the dimensions are smaller, or use fewer
frames.
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