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3 min read

Mar 22, 2021

How to Create Twitch Emotes

Requirements, Sizing and Guidelines to Create Emotes for Your Twitch Channel

Ethan May

Read more by Ethan May

Last Updated on October 08, 2025

If you’ve spent any time watching Twitch, you’ve no doubt seen these tiny images pop up in the chat when something hilarious, awesome, or otherwise spectacular happens on screen.

These are Twitch emotes, and they play an extremely important role in streaming culture. Each one has a specific meaning, and as an affiliate or partner, you can even create your own.

Custom emotes are a fantastic perk to offer your subscribers. It is a great benefit that incentivizes your viewers to support you and gives you a unique way to make others feel like they're a part of a larger community.

Today, we’ll show you how to unlock Twitch emotes, how to create them, and even tell you the meaning of some of the top emotes.

How to Unlock Twitch Emotes

Twitch emotes are available for partner or affiliate streamers. To become a Twitch affiliate you must first reach the following achievements in 30 calendar days:

• Reach 50 Followers.
• Stream for 8 hours.
• Stream on 7 different days.
• Have an average of 3 viewers.

Looking for tips to help you become a Twitch affiliate? Lucky for you, we’ve got that covered. Here are five suggestions to help you:

1. Check Your Analytics
2. Collaborate and Build Relationships
3. Create a Community
4. Attend Events and Conferences
5. Be Active on Social Media

For a detailed breakdown of each of the points above, please click here to check out our blog post on that topic.

How to Create Twitch Emotes

After you’ve unlocked emotes, you can add or delete them, assign them to a specific subscriber tier, and customize them to reinforce your brand.

To add Twitch emotes, go to your dashboard on Twitch and click on “Viewer Rewards”. Upload a new emote by clicking the + button under the tier you’d like to add it to.

Twitch provides a handy auto-resize option to ensure your emotes are always the correct dimension. Please make sure you upload a single square image between 112 x 112px and 4096 x 4096px and Twitch auto resizer will do the rest.

Follow Twitch’s Guidelines

When uploading your custom emotes, be sure to follow Twitch’s Terms of Service and Community Guidelines

Examples of content prohibited from use in emotes include, but is not limited to, the following:

• Hateful conduct
• Harassment
• Threats of violence
• Obscene content
• Sexual content
• Gasm-style emotes
• Nudity
• Illegal drugs

In addition to content prohibited by our Community Guidelines, we also prohibit the following from use in emotes:

• Vulgarity
• Glorifying or encouraging violations of Community Guidelines
• Politics
• Animations
• Individual letters and characters
• Violations of Twitch Brand Assets Guidelines
• Emotes based on Twitch Global Emotes

Be sure to check out Twitch’s emote guideline support article for more information.

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