Adding a Static Sticker to a Set of Animated Ones in Telegram

Let me note from the very beginning that the purpose of this mini article is not teaching how to create sticker packs/sets in the Telegram messenger (this is generally one of its brightest features) – there is the exhaustive official documentation for this.

I will only note that for some reason Telegram has separate sets of stickers of different types: animated (maximum 50 stickers in a set), video (maximum 50 stickers in a set) and static (maximum 120 stickers in a set). The separation, in my opinion, is artificial and inconvenient for Telegram users, primarily for the creators of sticker sets.

Once I had the task of combining static and animated stickers in one Telegram set, so by trial and error I set up such a technical process, and this mini article is just about that, about the tricky addition of static stickers to a set of animated ones (it is clear that vice versa is impossible).

A brief description of the bypass technique used: static stickers can be represented as stickers with 0 animation, that is, as if animated (technically) but the animation is invisible to the eye, each of its next frames is equal to the previous one.

And here is the step-by-step algorithm of adding a static sticker to a set of animated ones in Telegram:

1. Save a static sticker from Telegram Desktop to the raster WebP format.

   

2. Open the raster WebP sticker in FastStone Image Viewer (the GIMP graphic editor as a reserve but heavier tool) and save it in the also raster PNG format with transparency.

   

3. Convert the raster PNG sticker to the vector SVG format using the PNG to SVG online tool (with one of my stickers this tool did not work in the Chrome web browser, it worked only in Firefox with a VPN 🤔).

   

4. Convert the vector SVG sticker (with addition of animation, zero animation is OK) to the Lottie format using the SVG to Lottie online tool (Convert SVG to Lottie (.json) as a reserve online tool but it often gives the 502 error).

5. Convert the animated Lottie sticker to the Telegram Sticker (TgS) format using the Lottie/TgS Editor online tool (unfortunately, it often makes some closed transparent areas filled with color, and its more well-working competitor has ceased to exist).

6. If the conversion failed because the TgS file exceeded the size of 64 kbytes then go back to the step 2 and use the TinyPNG online tool and/or the GIMP offline editor (from which to save the PNG with the “Use web-optimized palette” setting) to decrease the size.

   
7. Add the animated TsS sticker to a set of animated stickers using the official Telegram Stickers bot and its /addsticker command.