Stickers have to be small to feel instant in a chat. Here is what matters for size, length and file size, and what tosticker does about each.
Pixels: square, 512 × 512
WhatsApp stickers are square and made at 512 × 512 pixels. tosticker’s Sharp quality makes exactly that. Light quality makes a 320-pixel sticker, which looks almost the same at chat size and is a much smaller file.
Not every clip is square. In the Frame tab, Fit whole clip keeps everything and leaves see-through space around it; Square crop fills the sticker and lets you drag to choose what stays in.
Length: up to four seconds
tosticker keeps up to four seconds of a clip, and starts you on two. Short loops look better and make smaller files. Speed and direction change the length too: 0.5× doubles it, and Boomerang plays the clip forward and back, so it has twice the frames.
WhatsApp plays an animated sticker for 10 seconds at most. The only mix that would go past that is 0.5× with Boomerang, so with that pair tosticker keeps up to 2.5 seconds of the clip. The speed guide has more.
Frame rate: 12 a second
Stickers play at 12 frames a second. That is smooth enough for a reaction and keeps the file small enough to send.
File size: smaller pastes better
When you paste a GIF, WhatsApp turns it into a sticker only if the file is small enough; a bigger one arrives as a GIF instead. WhatsApp doesn’t publish that cutoff. In our tests on an iPhone, stickers up to about 900 KB arrived as stickers. tosticker shows the file size on the result screen so you can see where you are.
If yours arrives as a GIF, make it again with Light quality or a shorter clip.
Sticker packs made by apps
Apps that publish sticker packs follow WhatsApp’s separate rules for packs: 512 × 512 WebP files, about 100 KB for a still sticker and 500 KB for an animated one. Pasting a single sticker into a chat, the way tosticker works, doesn’t need a pack.