This free tool turns your photos into incredible emoji mosaics — try it now!

A Google software engineer has created an image processing tool that transforms pictures into emoji. The tool, named Emoji Mosaic, has been around since last March but it was brought to our attention only earlier today via The Verge.

We don’t know exactly how it works, but it looks like it uses an algorithm to automatically replace blocks of color with similarly-colored emojis. Upload an image on the dedicated webpage, and within seconds it will be transformed into an emoji mosaic. An emosaic, if you will.

It seems to work particularly well with lots of bright colors as darker shades can default to single emoji showing little variation — something you can see on the lower left of the image above and right on the image below. You can get better results by uploading a higher quality image too.

There have been similar photo filters like this over the years but it’s nonetheless clever; identifying which individual emoji has been used for which color block is particularly enjoyable. And it’s completely free, so you’ve no good excuse not to give it a whirl.

In other recent emoji news, the new 2019 emojis were revealed just last week and they include falafel and an otter — read more on that at the previous link.