How To: Add Emoji Icons to iOS Folders

If you want to customize iOS folders without having to jailbreak your iPhone or iPad, this how to guide is for you.  Adding little icons (known as emoji’s) to your iOS folder names is actually very simple.  The first thing you need to do is add the Emoji keyboard to your list of available keyboards on iOS and then from there it’s just a matter of selecting the icons when you’re editing the folder name.

In order to add the Emoji keyboard to your list of accessible keyboards in iOS, go the Settings, then go to General, and scroll down to Keyboard.  Enter the Keyboard settings, and underneath the first set of options (Auto-Capitalization, Auto-Correct, etc), you’ll see an option for Keyboards, tap on that, and then tap on the Add New Keyboard… option.  You should now see list of different language keyboards, scroll down to Emoji, and tap it.  That’s it, the Emoji keyboard is now accessible to you.

Once you’ve done all that, the Keyboards setting screen should look like the screenshot below.

Next, go back to your home screen and hold down any of your app icons or folders until they start wiggling.  Once they’re wiggling, go to the folder you want to customize with emoji’s and tap it.  After the folder is open, tap on the name of the folder so the cursor appears, you can hold down on the cursor to drag it to wherever you like (e.g. to the front of the folder name), then select the icon that looks like a globe (see the screenshot below) to bring up the emoji keyboard.

Once you tap on that globe-looking icon, you will see the emoji keyboard (as shown in the screenshot below), from there you can add as many emoji icons as you would like to the name of your folder.  There’s hundreds of them, making it easy to find ones that align with the contents of the folder.

When you’re done editing the folder names, you can hit the home button again to make everything stop wiggling.

Here’s my current home screen, complete with emojized (is that a word? it is now) folder names.

Thanks to my friend, Steve Mermelstein, for the awesome tip.