Weejistick™Making Telegram stickers without a bot
What changed, and what still needs the bot · last checked August 2026
Most guides still tell you to open @Stickers and work through a chat with a robot. For photo stickers that advice is now out of date: Telegram has a proper sticker editor built into the app. For video stickers it is still true, and that is worth understanding before you go looking for a workaround that does not exist.
Photo stickers: no bot needed
Open the sticker panel from the message field in any chat and tap the + button. Telegram's
built-in editor takes a photo, removes the
background in one tap, and lets you add text, drawings, emoji and the classic white outline. You can
build a whole set and share it with a t.me link without ever talking to a bot.
If you are making stickers from photos, stop here. This is free, native, and better than any third party route.
Video stickers: still a file you have to make
Telegram's editor does not turn your own video clips into video stickers. To get a looping clip into a pack, something has to produce a file that meets the spec: 512 px on one side, VP9 in WEBM, under 256 KB, 3 seconds, no audio. Telegram will not do that conversion for you.
The three honest options
| Telegram's editor | Free, native, no bot. Photos only. The right answer for static stickers. |
|---|---|
| ffmpeg + @Stickers | Free and fully under your control, and you keep the file. Needs a terminal, and you still finish in the bot to publish the pack. Command and steps in the video sticker guide. |
| A sticker app | Fastest for video, and no terminal. The thing worth checking before you install one is where your video goes. |
The question to ask about any sticker app
Plenty of sticker makers upload your clip to a server to do the conversion, because encoding VP9 is easier on someone else's computer than on a phone. That is a reasonable engineering choice and a perfectly bad privacy one, especially for the sort of clip people actually want as a sticker. Many also want an account before they will do anything.
So the question is simply: does the conversion happen on the device, and do I have to log in?
For what it is worth, Weejistick is our answer to that. It encodes on the phone, has no backend and no account, and you can verify the claim yourself in about ten seconds by turning on Airplane Mode and making a sticker. It still works, because nothing needed to leave. The App Store privacy label says Data Not Collected, and that is the whole of it.
Get Weejistick on the App Store
It is iPhone only, and free to use with a one-time unlock to remove the watermark. If you are on Android, the ffmpeg route above costs nothing and works fine.
Telegram's in-app editor is described on the Telegram blog; sticker limits are from the official documentation.