Stickers for Nextcloud Talk

Send stickers and GIFs in Nextcloud Talk, from the browser, the desktop app and the Talk apps for Android and iOS.

• About 8,400 stickers in five open-licensed packs: Fluent Emoji (3D), Noto Emoji (animated and still), OpenMoji and Twemoji. Your server downloads them after installation.
• Your own stickers: upload images to a shared folder, and everyone who can read the folder can send them.
• Stickers arrive as pictures: animated ones keep moving, and there's no link text around them.
• /sticker party or /sticker 🎉 sends a sticker from any Talk client, phones included.
• /gif happy dance sends a GIF from GIPHY, if the GIPHY integration is set up.
• A sticker page for phones: you can add it to your home screen and share a sticker to Talk through the phone's share sheet.

Requirements

• Nextcloud 32 to 36 with Talk. Talk 25 or later sends stickers and GIFs as pictures; older versions send them as links.
• PHP with the zip extension. Imagick (with SVG and WebP support) converts animated stickers to GIF, which Talk animates; without it, those stickers are sent as links.
• Background jobs run by cron, as Nextcloud recommends. The sticker packs are built by a background job.
• About 600 MB of disk space in the app data for the packs. The server needs to reach GitHub, unicode.org and fonts.gstatic.com once, to download them.

Installing

1. Install Talk stickers from the app store (Apps, Social & communication). Or unpack a release's talk_stickers-X.Y.Z.tar.gz into custom_apps/ and run occ app:enable talk_stickers.

2. Wait for the packs. A background job downloads and builds them; this takes a few minutes. To build them at once instead, run:

   occ talk_stickers:packs
   

3. Optional, for your own stickers: install Team folders, create a team folder named Stickers and share it with the people who should see them.

4. Optional, for GIFs: install the GIPHY integration and enter its API key in the admin settings.

Using it

In the browser and the desktop app: in a Talk conversation, type /sticker and press Enter, or choose the paperclip, Smart picker, Stickers. Pick a sticker, then press Enter to send it. The picker has a tab per pack, categories, search, and a Recent tab for the stickers you sent last. The picker also works in other apps with the Smart Picker, such as Text, where it inserts the sticker's link.

In any client, phones included, send a message that starts with /sticker:

Message	Sends
/sticker 🎉	that emoji's sticker
/sticker party	the sticker whose name or keywords fit best (English words)
/sticker twemoji cat	a sticker from the pack named first (fluent, noto, openmoji, twemoji, or ours for your own)
/sticker	a link to the sticker page
/gif happy dance	the first GIF GIPHY finds (words in your language)

The message is replaced before it's saved, so nobody sees what you typed. Words that fit no sticker are sent as you typed them. /stickers and /gifs work too, and so do /giphy and /naklejka (Polish).

On a phone, you can also open the sticker page, https://<your cloud>/apps/talk_stickers/ (Stickers in the app menu), and add it to your home screen. Tap a sticker, then Share and choose Talk and the conversation, or Copy link and paste it into Talk.

Your own stickers: put PNG, JPEG, GIF or WebP images in a subfolder of the Stickers folder. Each subfolder is a pack, for example Stickers/Dog/Happy.png.

Where sent stickers are kept

A sticker or GIF sent as a picture is saved in your folder for that conversation, Talk/<conversation>/<you>/, the folder Talk uses for your attachments there; a sticker you send again reuses its file. If the folder doesn't exist yet, the app creates it and shares it with the conversation, as Talk does for your first attachment, but without Talk's "shared a folder" message. Stickers count against your storage quota, a few hundred kilobytes each at most.

Settings

All settings are optional, set with occ config:app:set talk_stickers <key> --value <value>:

Key	Default	Meaning
folder	Stickers	The shared folder with your own stickers
packs	all	The packs to build, comma-separated: fluent, noto-animated, noto, openmoji, twemoji. Run occ talk_stickers:packs after changing it
command_pack	noto-animated	The pack /sticker prefers when several stickers fit equally well

The rating and language of GIFs come from the GIPHY integration's own settings.

Troubleshooting

• The picker shows no packs: the packs aren't built yet. Check that background jobs run by cron, or run occ talk_stickers:packs, which shows each pack as it's done.
• Stickers or GIFs arrive as links: the sender has no free storage quota, Talk is older than 25, or Imagick is missing (php -m | grep imagick). The server log says which.
• /gif is sent as typed: the GIPHY integration is missing or has no API key.

How it works

The app (app/talk_stickers/) is PHP and plain JavaScript, with no build step.

• Picker: a custom element of the Smart Picker, js/talk_stickers.js. A reference provider, lib/Reference/StickerReferenceProvider.php, shows a sticker link (/apps/talk_stickers/s/<pack>/<id>) as the sticker.
• /sticker and /gif: lib/Listener/StickerCommandListener.php listens to Talk's BeforeChatMessageSentEvent. It finds the sticker (StickerService::search()) or the GIF (GifService), saves it in the sender's conversation folder (made and shared with Talk's own ConversationFolderService when missing; QuietFolderShareListener keeps Talk from announcing that share), and rewrites the message into Talk's own message of that file, which refers to it by file id, as Talk 25's attachments do. WebP and SVG stickers are converted with Imagick; the results are kept in the app data.
• Packs: lib/Packs/Builder.php builds them into the app data from the sources pinned in lib/Packs/manifest.json. Archives are checked against their SHA-256, and Unicode's emoji list supplies names and categories. Noto's images come from Google's emoji CDN, which has no pinned versions. Skin-tone variants are left out. A build goes into a new folder, which is used only once it's complete.
• Images: /apps/talk_stickers/img/<pack>/<file> serves the packs' images, public and cached, because the phone apps load previews without a login.

Reporting problems

Please open an issue on GitHub: sarumaj/nextcloud-talk-stickers. Say which versions of Nextcloud, Talk and this app you use, and which Talk client.

Developing

composer install && vendor/bin/phpunit

The tests need neither Nextcloud nor network. CI (.forgejo/workflows/ci.yml) lints the PHP and JavaScript, checks appinfo/info.xml against the app store's schema and runs the tests. The code lives at git.ciepiela.org; GitHub has a copy, where the issues are.

To release, tag vX.Y.Z with the same version as in appinfo/info.xml. The release workflow (.forgejo/workflows/release.yml) then:

1. builds talk_stickers-X.Y.Z.tar.gz;
2. signs it with the app store key (secret APP_SIGNING_KEY);
3. attaches it to the release;
4. publishes it on the app store (secret APPSTORE_TOKEN).

Licence

The app is licensed under the AGPL-3.0-or-later. The sticker packs keep their own licences; see NOTICE.md. The picker shows each pack's attribution.