Set an Animated Emoji for your Mac User Profile

Dan Wassink 0:01
In this video, we’re going to look at how we can set an animated emoji for our login icon on the Mac. This was introduced with Mac OS Monterey. Let’s go to my Mac. Let’s first review what our login icon is, I’m going to go up to my System Preferences here, I go up to my Apple menu here. And then we go over to our System Preferences. When we’re looking at our account under Users and Groups here, what you’re going to see is an icon. When we click on the Edit button here, what I’m able to do is choose from a number of different icons or images here, I can even go on add my own here. Now this has been the default behavior of MacOS for quite a while, I just click on whichever icon I want.

Let’s go ahead and change this, we’re going to swipe up here. And I’m going to go with the guitar here. I click on it. And now we can see when I click on save that my log on icon as a guitar. So now let’s log out and take a look at this. I’m going to just press in on the power button here. And it’s going to log me out. And now we can see we have my guitar here. Now what we can do is we can animate this, we can make it an animated emoji. How do we do that? Well, let’s go ahead and log back in. I’m going to press in on my login button here, my power button, I’m logged back in. Now we need to go back over to our System Preferences. So I go up to the Apple menu here, and we go over to our System Preferences. From here, we need to go back over to our users and groups.

This is where I set it up as a guitar. And from here, we need to go to our icon, I click on edit here. And when I do instead of going over to camera photos and suggestions. This is where we can see all of our different photos here that we’re used to. Instead of going to there, what we need to do is go up to the top and you’re going to see my emoji. This is introduced with MacOS Monterey. When I select my emoji, what I’m able to do is select from any one of these emojis and have it as my login icon. I can even create a new emoji here, I click on the plus. And then I can go and design it here. Now I already have one design. So I have this one here of me. If I want to edit it, I just click on it. And then I can click on edit here. And then I can go and make changes to it, I’m just going to leave it the same. So I click on cancel. So now I have this emoji selected.

That’s pretty much all we have to do. I’m going to click on save here. And now let’s log back out and take a look at that icon again. I’m going to press it on the Power button to log out. And we can see we have my emoji here. It’s animated, the eyes are blinking it’s looking around. Let’s go ahead and put in a password here. This my emoji is going to watch me put in the password, I’m putting in a wrong password, I hit return. And the my emoji here will be like ah, that’s not the correct password. So I have to go in here and type it in again. And now when I type in the correct password, it’s going to let me in. So that’s an animated emoji for our login screen, we do have a few more options. Let’s go ahead and click on edit here.

And then we have to select our emoji again. And from here, what we’re able to do is strike a pose as they say, I click on this and I can select a pose. I can also style it, this basically adds a background to it. So now I go over to style here. And when I click on this, I can go and add a style. So let’s go ahead and select the orange one I like orange, so I click on orange. And now I go back over to pose. We’re gonna strike a pose here, click on Save. And now we can see that we styled that mammalogy, if I were to log back out, let’s go ahead and log out. You’re gonna see that it has my style there. And eventually it would strike a pose that pose that I selected where winks, I can click in here, it’ll watch me as I type it in. It’ll give me a dirty look as I type in the wrong password. And then when I type in the right password, it lets me in I don’t like that orange background there. It doesn’t really look that good. After all, I just go back over to my edit here. I have to select my my emoji. You always have to select your emoji, and then you go over to style. And then you can select a different style.

I click on Save. And now that style has been saved. So that’s how we can add animated emojis to our login screen. Again, this was introduced with Mac OS Monterey. Basically what we’re able to do is animate our logo our icon when we Have our login, it’ll kind of look around. It’ll wink at you. If you type in a password, it’ll watch you type in that password. And then if you type in a wrong password, it’ll give you a dirty look. To set all this up, you just go to your System Preferences, users and groups, and then click on your icon. From there you go to my emoji at the top of the list of all the different categories. And then you can create your own emoji or edit an existing emoji. You can also add a post to it and style it. So that’s how we add animated emojis to our login icon or as our login icon on the Mac.