Transferring animated and video Telegram stickers to WhatsApp

If you only want the steps and your pack is static, the shorter guide is how to add Telegram stickers to WhatsApp on iPhone. This page is about the animated cases specifically, because that is where the real work — and the real limits — are.

Telegram has two animated formats, and they are nothing alike

"Animated sticker" in Telegram covers two genuinely different things. Which one you have decides how the conversion behaves and what the free tier will give you.

Animated stickers (.tgs)

These are vector animations — instructions for drawing shapes over time, not pixels. That makes the source files tiny, but it also means nothing can display them without a renderer that understands the format. WhatsApp has no such renderer. To move one, it has to be rasterized frame by frame and muxed into an animated WebP.

StickerBridge does this on the device rather than on a server. That keeps the sticker's pixels on your phone, and it is also the faster path: the source file is far smaller than the rendered result, so converting locally avoids downloading the big version over mobile data.

Video stickers (.webm)

These are short looping videos with a real transparency channel. Decoding them needs a video codec, which is a much heavier job than drawing vector shapes — so this conversion runs on a server rather than on the phone.

That difference in cost is the reason the two have different free-tier limits, which is the next section.

The free-tier caps, stated plainly

Three separate ceilings apply, and it helps to keep them apart.

A free user cannot export a video sticker pack at all. Not a reduced set, not a watermarked set — nothing. If you open a video pack on the free tier and expect a partial import, you will get an empty result and reasonably conclude something is broken. It is not: that is the limit. Pro is what removes it.

Separately, and on top of all of that, WhatsApp itself allows a maximum of 30 stickers in one pack and requires at least 3. That is WhatsApp's rule and it applies to everyone, Pro included. What Pro changes is that a pack larger than 30 gets divided across several WhatsApp packs instead of being cut short — named Name (1/3), Name (2/3), Name (3/3), and sized equally, so 75 stickers becomes three packs of 25 rather than 30 + 30 + 15.

Steps

1. Get the pack link. In Telegram, long-press a sticker in a chat, tap View pack, then the ⋯ button and Copy link. You want a link containing addstickers. Full detail in how to copy a Telegram sticker pack link.
2. Paste it into StickerBridge on your iPhone.
3. Let the conversion run. Animated packs take longer than static ones — each sticker is being rendered, not just resized, and the app shows you which sticker it is on. This is the slow part; it is normal.
4. Check the preview. The stickers animate in the preview, so you can confirm the animation survived before anything reaches WhatsApp.
5. Add to WhatsApp and accept WhatsApp's own confirmation prompt. If the pack was split into parts, each part is handed over in turn and confirmed separately.

Why you cannot do this by hand

The obvious-looking manual route — save the stickers, import them yourself — does not work for animated packs, for a specific reason rather than a vague one. A saved .tgs file is a compressed vector animation; there is no step where it becomes something WhatsApp accepts without a renderer in between. A saved .webm needs a codec and a re-encode. And in both cases the output has to land inside WhatsApp's format constraints — the exact pixel size, the file-size ceiling per sticker, and a separate tray icon — before WhatsApp will take the pack at all. Those are covered in WhatsApp sticker size and format requirements.

When something goes wrong

The export produced nothing

If it was a video pack and you are not on Pro, that is the cap — zero is the expected result. Otherwise, see below.

"Stickers too large" or too few stickers fit

WhatsApp enforces a file-size ceiling per sticker, and a very detailed animation can exceed it after conversion. WhatsApp also needs at least 3 stickers in a pack, so if too many of a pack's stickers are over the ceiling there is nothing valid left to send. Retrying will not shrink them — a different pack is the fix.

The stickers arrived but are not moving

Worth checking that the pack was actually animated in Telegram. Packs sometimes mix still and animated stickers, so a partly-static tray can be correct. If the whole pack is static in WhatsApp but animated in Telegram, that points at the conversion rather than the pack.

Conversion is taking a long time

Expected for large animated packs — every sticker is rendered individually. The status line shows the current sticker and the total.

Frequently asked questions