Emojify — image and webcam to emoji mosaic tool

Each frame is reduced to a low-resolution grid, and every cell maps to the emoji whose mean RGB is nearest in Euclidean distance, from a precomputed lookup of every renderable glyph. The metric ignores texture, and that coarseness is why it holds: matches stay stable across Apple, Google, Microsoft and Twemoji, which draw the same glyph differently. A second pass flood-fills neighboring cells that resolved to the same glyph and merges them at 2x, 4x or 8x, so flat regions collapse into large emoji and detail stays at base resolution. ImageMagick normalizes input and ffmpeg splits video and webcam into frames. A sibling build, emoji-mosaic-webgl, runs the reduction live on the webcam in one shader pass with a 64-glyph atlas, trading the merge pass for latency.

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ARD Tagesschau anchor rebuilt from emoji, a pink figure against a blue studio wall

Plastikman's Musik sleeve rebuilt from red and black emoji — hearts, spades, lips, flamingos

KCTV news anchor rebuilt from emoji in pink and blue against a pale ground

Emojify's web app with a finished mosaic of the KCTV anchor