How to Upload Custom Emoji in Slack

I used to work for a company that had a few thousand custom emoji in Slack, which I admit got annoying—certain managers overused them to the point where I rarely had any idea what they were trying to say. Even so, I miss some of those emoji—it’s like I’ve left a part of my vocabulary behind.

I know this sounds odd. I’m a writer, and words should be enough, but sometimes a linked tweet is so terrible that only an animated “This is Fine” or “Oh No” emoji can get my disgust across. These modern hieroglyphics express what words cannot, and losing access to them feels weird. Building an entire Slack emoji collection from scratch is time-consuming, though, because you can upload only one emoji at a time. So here’s how to avoid that tedium so you can quickly rebuild a massive emoji collection in your Slacks.

Download All the Emoji

To get started you’re going to want to download all the emoji you want to add. Slackmojis is probably the collection you should 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, you can use the Chrome and Firefox extension DownThemAll. Just head to any of the category pages on Slackmoji, launch DownThemAll, and set it to download only images. You’ll get every emoji on the page in a couple of seconds.

If you’re mostly interested in adding a massive collection of party parrots—and who wouldn’t be—head to Cult Of The Party Parrot. You can download individual emoji you like; there’s also a zip file with all of them.

The site emoji.gg offers a bunch of emoji packs, which you can download all at once. The quality is probably a little lower, overall, but there’s a staggering amount offered, and you can download a zip file for any collection.

You can find other collections of emoji on Github— my friend Andrew Hedges compiled his personal set of work emojis, and there are a few other collections if you dig around.

However you collect your emoji, make sure that they’re all in one folder and every file is named what you’d like it to be named in Slack.

Bulk Upload Your New Collection

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

Simply drag your massive emoji collection here and the extension will do all of the work, uploading the emoji and giving them whatever names the files have. Any emoji with a conflicting name won’t upload, greatly reducing the odds of redundant emoji.

I could put down some nonsense here about how emoji are essential to functioning in the post-pandemic world, that they make workers more efficient by improving communication, or some other jargon-laden nonsense I have no basis for. It might even be true, but I don’t care. Custom emoji are fun and that’s reason enough to set them up—I hope your company, community, or group of friends enjoys them.