Tray icon

Each pack has one tray icon: the small image shown in WhatsApp's sticker picker when someone switches between packs. It is a separate file from the stickers.

Requirements

Rule	Value
Dimensions	96 × 96 px
File size	≤ 50 KB
Animation	Not allowed — static even for animated packs
Format	PNG in WhatsApp's sample apps (tray_image_file in contents.json)

Designing for 96 px

The tray icon is the only part of a pack that people see before opening it, and it is shown even smaller than 96 px on most phones. Shrinking a 512 px sticker usually produces mush. Instead:

• Pick one recognisable element — a face, a character's silhouette, a single bold glyph.
• Drop the text. Lettering that reads at 512 px is illegible at tray size.
• Increase stroke weight and contrast so the icon survives on both light and dark themes.
• Keep transparency so it doesn't render as a box in the picker.

Creating one from a sticker

If you do start from an existing sticker, crop to the most recognisable part first, then scale:

# Crop the central 320 × 320 area of a 512 px sticker, then scale to 96 × 96

# ImageMagick (macOS, Linux, Windows)
magick sticker.png -gravity center -crop 320x320+0+0 +repage -resize 96x96 tray.png

# macOS built-in, no install needed
sips -c 320 320 sticker.png --out tray-crop.png && sips -z 96 96 tray-crop.png --out tray.png

Check the result at actual size on a phone before shipping — what looks fine on a desktop monitor is often unreadable in the picker.

Further reading

• Sticker size
• Pre-publish checklist