How to Make Stickers from a Photo on Android

A sticker isn't a special file type — it's a photo with two things a normal photo doesn't have: a subject cut cleanly away from its background, and transparency everywhere else. That's it. The playful chat-app stickers with a white outline are just a transparent cutout with a border effect added on top.

Which means the hard part of making a sticker is the same hard part as any cutout: getting the edges right. A sticker gets viewed small and often animated into a chat thread, so stray background pixels or a chopped-off ear are far more visible than they would be in a full photo.

Here's the full workflow in Cutout, from gallery photo to sticker-ready PNG:

1. 1

   Choose your photo

   Open Cutout and pick a photo with a clear subject — a person, pet, product or object. No account is needed to start editing.

2. 2

   Let the AI create the cutout

   On-device AI detects the subject and removes the background automatically in seconds, right on your phone.

3. 3

   Refine the edges closely

   Zoom in and check the outline carefully — this matters more for stickers than for almost anything else. Use the Keep brush to restore missed details and the Erase brush to remove background fragments, adjusting brush size for fine areas like whiskers or fingers.

4. 4

   Keep the background transparent

   Leave the background set to transparent so the sticker has no rectangle around it once placed on a chat bubble or design.

5. 5

   Export your PNG

   Export the finished cutout. It saves as a high-quality transparent PNG to Pictures/Cutout, ready to send or reuse.

Reveal the A pet photo, cut out and ready to become a sticker. cutoutOriginalCutout

The bold white border around most chat-app stickers is called a keyline, and it exists for a practical reason: it keeps the sticker readable against any chat background, light or dark. Cutout's editor is focused on getting the cutout itself right — the subject detection, edge refinement and transparent export — rather than adding decorative borders.

Once you have a clean transparent PNG from Cutout, a dedicated sticker-maker app (there are several free ones built specifically for WhatsApp and Telegram packs) can add the keyline, resize to the platform's required dimensions, and bundle multiple stickers into a pack. Think of Cutout as producing the raw material — the hard part — and the sticker-maker app as the finishing step.

• iMessage, Signal, Telegram — most messaging apps let you attach a PNG directly; a transparent cutout sends and displays just like a native sticker.
• WhatsApp sticker packs — import your transparent PNG into a sticker-maker app to add a keyline and publish it as part of a pack.
• Instagram Stories — add your cutout as an image sticker and resize or rotate it freely over any background.
• Discord and Slack — custom emoji and stickers both start from a transparent PNG; check each platform's size limit before uploading.
• Notebooks, planners, print — transparent PNGs print cleanly onto sticker paper without a visible background box.

Cutout keeps up to 24 recent uploads in private local storage, so it's easy to reopen a cutout and re-export it after checking it against a platform's requirements.

• Exporting as JPG. JPG can't store transparency, so the sticker arrives with a solid-colour box around it instead of floating cleanly.
• Skipping the zoom check. Ragged edges are invisible at thumbnail size in the editor and glaring once the sticker is placed in a chat.
• Leaving too much empty space. Crop close to the subject before exporting — extra transparent margin makes the sticker look small when it's actually placed at a fixed size.
• Ignoring platform size limits. WhatsApp and Telegram both enforce specific pixel dimensions and file-size caps for sticker packs — check the sticker-maker app's requirements before publishing.