Life

3 Hacks That Make Tracking Down The Perfect Emoji So Much Easier

by Caroline Burke
Cute Young Adult Girl Typing  on Smartphone With Variable Yellow Emoticons Sticker Communication Con...
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World Emoji Day is July 17, and that can only mean one thing: sending endless animated texts to all of your friends and family, with as many unicorns, mermaids, and piles of poop as you can. But with all of that celebration might come a little bit of fatigue. No one wants to spend several minutes of their day scrolling through all of the options — which is probably why you're looking for an easier way to search for emojis.

The good news is that there are a few hacks available for you to keep all your favorite emojis at thumb's length. From apps to keyboard shortcuts, you'll be covered now that the fifth annual World Emoji Day is about to be here in full force. What's more, the reason why the holiday takes place on July 17 has to do with emojis themselves: the only emoji revealing a date is the calendar emoji, which is forever stopped at July 17. If you check out the official site for World Emoji Day, you can stay on top of the events as they happen — and even cast your vote for the best new emoji of 2019 (the best new emoji in 2018 was "thinking face").

In the meantime, here are the three easiest ways to ensure your favorite emojis are always available to you right when you need them:

Predictive Text Feature

Caroline Burke

If you don't want to download a new app, you can always try taking more advantage of a little hack that's built right into the emoji keyboard itself. The predictive text feature basically takes the words you're typing and offers emoji suggestions to add. For example, if you're inviting a friend to coffee, the predictive text feature will offer the coffee cup emoji. Or if you type the word "dog," the dog emojis will show up.

In other instances, if you're referencing an emotion like happiness, the feature will offer up multiple applicable emojis. And the best part is that you don't have to download anything or make any changes to your keyboard — the emojis will automatically appear directly below your text box, as can be seen in the image above. Both iPhone and Android should provide the predictive text feature for you. If you have an Android, you can also consider some of these apps to auto-suggest emojis for you as you type.

The Fixmoji App

The Fixmoji app allows you to make your own keyboard with all of your favorite emojis. Specifically, you can organize your most-used emojis so that they show up in the first page, and you don't get stuck scrolling through page after page of emojis you literally never use. The app is available on the App Store for 99 cents.

The Gboard App

Similar to the predictive text feature, Gboard, Google's keyboard app for both iOS and Android, offers an option for you to search for the emoji you want without having to scroll through page after page. Even better, Gboard offers built-in access to Google search, so that you can search for image alternatives if an emoji expression isn't quite doing it for you today.

Now that you know how to keep your emojis at your fingertips, World Emoji Day will be that much better. If you want to take part in the holiday to the fullest, don't forget to use #WorldEmojiDay on Twitter.