Do Emojis Count As Picture Messages? (Read To Know!)

As the saying goes, a picture paints a thousand words. And very often this is indeed the case. Especially when it comes to the emotions that play on our faces when we react to something.

And now it seems like our entire facial expression repertoire has been translated into easy to understand emojis.

There are even some emojis that do a better job of expressing our emotions than our faces tend to do. Take for example the hug emoji, or the skeptical or confused emojis, or the laughing crying emoji, or the various emojis demonstrating degrees of upset.

What’s more, emojis aren’t limited to displays of emotion, but they also feature many (and I mean many) common, easily recognized objects.

But the question this article aims to answer is whether these emojis count as picture messages.

I can certainly see why someone might think they are, because by definition they are messages. And, you could easily send someone a message that consisted entirely of emojis, without a single word or letter added.

So, does an emoji count as a picture message? Well, let’s find out!

Emoji VS Picture Messages: A Comparison

The Types Of Picture Messages

There are several ways to communicate through pictures. You can use images, videos, GIFs, stickers, and much more. In this section, we’ll briefly discuss each type of picture message.

Text-Based Pictures

Text-based pictures are just that – pictures with no additional information. They don’t have any emoticons or symbols attached to them.

In fact, they don’t even contain any text. These pictures are perfect if you want to quickly convey your thoughts or feelings.

You can create text-based pictures either manually or automatically. Manual creation involves typing all the letters yourself, but then sending them in a picture format rather than as a mere text MMS. Automatic creation uses a computer program to generate text from your image.

Images

Images are probably the most popular way to send a picture message. The reason for this is simple – they’re really easy to make. All you need is a smartphone, and you’re good to go.

One of the more popular types of picture messages is a photo. It’s one of the easiest things to take a picture of, so it makes sense to use it when sending a picture message.

Another popular type of image is a sticker.Traditionally, stickers used to be adhesive images that you could stick onto solid objects, but nowadays, the term sticker is also used to refer to images you can pass on online. They’re often used on social media sites like Facebook, Messenger and Instagram.

Videos

Video messages are similar to images, except they usually contain audio too. That means you can hear what’s being said.

GIFs

GIFs are short animations. Like videos, they contain both still images and sound. However, unlike videos, GIFs only last a few seconds before they stop playing.

Stickers

Stickers are small images that you can add to other messages. They’re often used to express an emotion or sentiment. For example, you might add a heart sticker to a friend’s birthday card to show how happy you are about their day.

But What About Emojis?

Now, we’ve discussed the different kinds of picture messages, but what about emojis? Are they considered picture messages? Let’s look at the evidence on both sides.

First, there’s the obvious difference between emojis and text-based pictures. They do not look at all like text, and it would be very hard to argue that they are not in fact pictures.

Second, if you wanted to send someone a picture message using text, you’d have to type it out first. But emojis are already provided in a form that’s ready to be sent.

Third, both picture messages and emojis can be sent by both MMS and SMS messaging.

This last piece of contradictory evidence, however, is crucial. Emojis are part of the Unicode standard.

The Unicode Standard provides a unique number for every character, no matter what platform, device, application, or language. This means that they’re widely supported by smartphones around the world.

This Unicode standard is what provides special, unique codes for emojis, so that they appear the same on every app and device. Or at least very similar.

So, emojis technically aren’t actually images. Instead, they’re icons made up of characters to appear as an image. This means that they don’t technically fall into the category of “picture messages.”

So, Does An Emoji Count As A Picture Message?

It seems pretty clear then, that emojis are not picture messages. They’re simply a part of the Unicode standard, which means they technically aren’t actually images.

There are some people who may argue that they count picture messages because they’re designed to replace text.

However, this argument doesn’t really hold water. Emojis may be easier to read than text, and they are certainly far quicker to use than to type out words or sentences, but they could never entirely replace a whole language, despite all their efforts to do so.

Final Thoughts

So, I totally get why so many people would just automatically assume that emojis do not actually count as picture messages, given that they appear as mini-pictures.

But when you get down to the nitty gritty about how these emojis are encoded to appear the same across different apps and devices, it is clear that this encoding is not in picture form, and emojis technically are not picture messages.

Thank you for reading!