How to make an animated Discord sticker

Short answer: make it exactly 320×320, at most 512 KB, at most 5 seconds long, as APNG or GIF, then add it as a server sticker. The Discord sticker maker does the sizing and squeezing in one step.

The rules

From Discord’s developer documentation, checked 29 October 2026. Discord’s older help-centre FAQ still lists APNG only for animated stickers; the developer documentation is the newer source and includes GIF.

Step by step

1. Trim it to 5 seconds or less. Short loops look best anyway. If your clip is a video, make a GIF first with the video to GIF converter.
2. Make it 320×320. If your animation isn’t square, pad it with transparency rather than stretching it.
3. Get it under 512 KB. This is where most stickers fail. Drop the GIF into the sticker maker: it searches for the best-looking file under the limit and shows a quality score.
4. Add it as a server sticker from your server settings. You need permission to manage emoji and stickers. Sending the file in the chat box doesn’t make it a sticker.

APNG or GIF?

Both are accepted. APNG keeps soft, semi-transparent edges, which GIF can’t (a GIF pixel is either fully visible or fully transparent). In our benchmark, the same animated emote under the same 512 KB limit came out at 45 dB as APNG, visually identical to the original, with all 90 frames kept. The sticker maker outputs APNG for that reason.

Why other tools make choppy stickers

Getting a few seconds of animation under 512 KB is the hard part, and the easy way out is to throw frames away. In our test, one popular resizer kept the first 59 of 90 frames and froze the last one for almost a second, cutting off the end of the animation. Check the frame count before you upload.