Twitch Emote Maker

Auto-resize versus manual mode. Twitch's uploader defaults to auto-resize: you hand it one square file and it cuts the three sizes for you. Turning auto-resize off lets you supply 112, 56 and 28 yourself, on a tighter per-file budget. Almost everyone should leave it on. The one real reason to take the tighter budget is to hand-tune the 28px version — which experienced emote artists genuinely do, thickening outlines and dropping details in the small file rather than letting a downsample smear them.

Why you will find four different answers to “what's the max file size?” Search that question and you get 25 KB, 100 KB, 512 KB and 1 MB, each stated with total confidence. All four are real Twitch numbers; they just describe different things, and the table above is the whole map. The one that causes the most trouble is 25 KB — that's the sub badge limit, and it gets copied onto emote guides constantly. The other trap is 512 KB, which sits under the “Animated Emotes” heading in Twitch's own documentation and does not apply to static PNGs at all.

The number to actually design to is about 25 KB per file. Not because Twitch demands it of emotes, but because a file that small clears every limit in the table at once, no matter which upload mode you end up using or how the documentation changes. There is no upside to a heavier emote — nothing about a chat line rewards a big PNG — so the conservative target costs you nothing and removes an entire category of failed upload. It's what our exporter and our free resizer both aim for.

Animated emotes are GIF only. Not WebM, not APNG, not MP4 — GIF, square, and no more than 60 frames. Sixty frames is four seconds at 15fps, two and a half at 24fps, two at 30. That budget, not the file size, is usually what kills an animation: a smooth three-second loop simply does not fit, so you either shorten it or drop the frame rate. Twitch also rejects anything that flashes or flickers more than three times in a second, which rules out most strobe and rave effects even though they compress beautifully. The static thumbnail defaults to the first frame of your GIF, so make frame one a pose that stands on its own — or upload a custom static image to override it. Our animated emote maker renders inside those limits rather than leaving you to discover them at upload time.

Sub badges are PNG, so there is no such thing as an animated sub badge. Badges also skip the review queue entirely, because they only ever appear in your own channel. Emotes go through manual review precisely because a subscriber can use them anywhere on Twitch. Tier 2 and Tier 3 badge flair — the little overlay on a higher-tier subscriber's badge — needs its own set of six files, three per tier, at the same sizes and the same 25 KB ceiling.

Everything needs a genuinely transparent background. Not white, not a checkerboard, not “close enough” — an actual alpha channel. This is the single most common reason a perfectly good piece of art looks wrong in chat: a white-backed emote renders as a bright rectangle sitting in a dark chat line. Every emote generated here comes out with a real alpha channel already cut.

One more thing that trips people up: you need an emote prefix first. Twitch won't let you upload anything until you've set one. Your prefix is glued to the front of each emote code, so a prefix of nova plus a code of Love becomes novaLove in chat. Pick it carefully: Partners in good standing can change it once every 60 days, and everyone else gets a single change after a username change.

BetterTTV is the one to start with. It renders emotes at 28, 56 and 112 pixels — the identical ladder Twitch uses — which means the square transparent PNG you would upload to Twitch works on BTTV unchanged, and vice versa. One file, both destinations, no re-export. It takes PNG and GIF, so animated emotes work with none of Twitch's Affiliate gating, and uploads go live in your channel immediately. If you want custom emotes in chat tonight and don't want to think about it, this is the answer.

7TV is where you go when you want more headroom. It serves four scales instead of three and delivers WebP and AVIF alongside GIF — modern formats that hold far more animation detail per byte than a GIF does. The interesting part is what it caps: the largest variant is 128 pixels tall, and the width is free. 7TV doesn't want square artwork, it wants a consistent line height, which is why wide emotes are a genuinely 7TV-native format. Exactly half the emotes in its own global set are non-square, and something like a 172×128 reaction has no equivalent on Twitch, which rejects anything that isn't a perfect square. If your set has a banner-style emote or a long reaction in it, this is where it can live.

FrankerFaceZ is the oldest and the most curated. It accepts the widest format list of the three — JPG, PNG and WebP for stills, APNG, GIF and WebP for animation — renders at 32, 64 and 128, and supports wide emotes on a fixed 3:1 ladder of 96×32, 192×64 and 384×128. The difference is process: FFZ runs new submissions through human approval, and its own submission page warns that can take a few days. It also enforces naming rules the others don't — no common English words, because an emote called Hey makes it impossible for anyone to type the word “hey” in your chat. That rule is good advice everywhere. Prefix your emote names on every service, exactly the way Twitch forces you to.

You don't have to choose. These services coexist — a viewer running two extensions sees emotes from both, and plenty of channels enable all three. The practical workflow is to generate your art once at a comfortable size with a transparent background and let each service do its own downscaling. One square PNG covers Twitch, BTTV, 7TV and FFZ; the only file you might make twice is a wide emote, which only 7TV and FFZ can display.