How to Upload Custom Emoji in Slack

Before I I work for a company that had a few thousand custom emojis in Slack, which I admit was annoying – certain managers used them so badly I could barely remember what they were trying to say. Still, I miss some of those emojis — it’s like I left some of my vocabulary behind.

I know that sounds strange. I’m a writer and words should do the trick, but sometimes a linked tweet is so awful that just an animated “That’s fine” or “Oh no” emoji can convey my disgust. These modern hieroglyphs express what words cannot, and it feels odd to lose access to them. However, creating an entire Slack emoji collection from scratch is time-consuming since you can only upload one emoji at a time. Here’s how to avoid that boredom so you can quickly rebuild a massive emoji collection in your pants.

Download all emojis

To get started, you should download any emojis you want to add. Slackmojis is probably the collection to check out first – it’s the most complete archive I’ve found. You can click any emoji to quickly download it to your browser’s default download folder. If that’s not fast enough for you, you can use the Chrome and Firefox extension DownThemAll. Just go to one of the category pages on Slackmoji, launch DownThemAll and set it to only download images. You will get any emoji on the page in few seconds.

If you’re primarily interested in adding a massive collection of party parrots – and who wouldn’t – then head over to Cult Of The Party Parrot. You can download individual emojis that you like; There is also a ZIP file with all of them.

The emoji.gg site offers a number of emoji packs that you can download all at once. The overall quality is probably a bit lower, but there’s an amazing amount on offer, and you can download a zip file for each collection.

You can find other emoji collections on Github – my friend Andrew Hedges put together his personal work emojis, and there are a few other collections if you poke around.

However you collect your emojis, make sure they’re all in one folder and each file has the name you want in Slack.

Upload your new collection in bulk

Now we need to download the Neutral Face Emoji Tools browser extension, which is only available for Chrome (users of other browsers can quickly use this for the upload process before moving on to something better). In Slack, click your server name in the top left corner and navigate to administration > To adjust. You will see the new Bulk Emoji Uploader at the top of the screen.

Slack about Justin Pot

Just drag your huge emoji collection here and the extension will do all the work, uploading the emoji and giving them the names the files have. Any emoji with a conflicting name will not be uploaded, greatly reducing the chance of redundant emoji.

I could write some nonsense here about how important emojis are to functioning in the post-pandemic world, how they make employees more efficient by improving communication, or some other jargon-laden nonsense that I have no basis for. It might even be true, but I don’t care. Custom emojis are fun and that’s reason enough to set them up – I hope your business, community or group of friends enjoy it.