How to Use Image Playground and Genmoji on iPhone, iPad, and Mac

Image Playground is Apple’s generative AI image creation tool, and it is available on iOS 18.2, iPadOS 18.2, and macOS 15.2. It allows you to create images in two styles, either from photos of people in your Photos library or by typing a description of the image you want.

Genmoji uses the same framework to create emojis that you can use in messages. If there isn’t an emoji for what you want to express, you can create your own. These Genmoji are stored in your library so you can reuse them whenever you want.

You can use these tools on the iPhone 15 Pro, or any iPhone 16 model; any iPad with an M-series chip; and any Mac with an M-series chip.

Here’s how to use Image Playground and Genmoji.

Get started with Image Playground

Image Playground lets you create generative images from photos or from prompts, descriptions of images. Unlike many AI image creation tools, Apple’s doesn’t create photorealistic images; Apple probably doesn’t want to provide a controversial image creation tool. As such, Apple offers two styles of images: animation and illustration. Animation images are glossy and look like cartoons; illustrations look more like hand-drawn images.

Open the Image Playground app on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. Click or tap , and you see this interface:

You can start playing with this tool to see the type of images it creates by clicking or tapping some of the suggestions. If you click or tap Style, you can change from Animation to Illustration. You can click multiple suggestions of themes at the bottom of the window to create, well, strange images, such as ones that combine robot, volcano, and chef. These themes are just a way to get you started, so you can see how varied the images can be. As the Image Playground app says at the bottom of its window, Beta: Image Playground may create unexpected results.

If you click Person, you can choose someone who is in the People & Pets album in your Photos library. (Though you can’t choose pets from this option.) You choose a starting point; a photo of that person to work from. Then you can add themes from the bottom of the window to alter the photo.

If you click Person > Appearance, then Edit, you can create images of people based on several palettes of suggestions. As you see in the screenshot below, you can choose different skin tones, and the images in the three pallets change on their own as you watch. Click one to select it, then click Done.

This takes you back to the main screen, where you will see images generated. As the images are created, you can click the Next > arrow to have Image Playground create more images, or click the Previous < arrow to go back to see what it’s already created; on iPad or iPhone, you can swipe back and forth. Each time you click or swipe the app creates a new image; this takes a few seconds each, and Image Playground creates up to 12 images.

When you’ve found an image you want to keep, click Done, and you see the full image. Click the right arrow < next to Image Playground at the top of the app to go to your library, which stores all the images you have created. These images sync via iCloud to your other compatible devices.

You can create an image from a photo in your Photos library, as long as it’s a photo of a pet, food, nature, and things like buildings and cars. If the app cannot create an image from your photo, it will say Unable to use that description.

You can also take a photo with an iPhone or iPad and use that to create an image. With any of these photos, you can click or tap any of the themes – up to seven – to give your image a flavor. Some of these include items of clothing for people; professions, such as artist, chef, and farmer; events like birthday, sunset, or summer; and locations, such as forest, desert, and volcano. You can click Style to switch between Animation and Illustration at any time.

Image Playground made some relatively good images of my cats, based on photos; if you accept the fact that in the photo of Titus on the left, his two legs merge into a single paw. The images do resemble my cats, more or less.

Images of buildings show the limits of generative AI image creation tools; they often look architecturally impossible, such as this image created from a photo of a church.

This image from a photo of a phone booth in my village is a bit more realistic, except for the fact that it’s in the middle of a street.

The final option is to create an image from a description. I tried several ridiculous prompts, such as "a cat eating a pizza in a bowling alley," "a penguin eating a sandwich in a kitchen," and "two penguins riding a bicycle." I also asked Image Playground to create an image of an iMac in a forest, and it told me that it couldn’t do that. I changed my prompt to "a desktop computer in a forest," and the resulting image looks a lot like an iMac.

You could spend a lot of time creating images that look silly, and perhaps that’s what many people will do.

Create Genmoji in Messages

If you use emoji in messages, sometimes you can’t find exactly what you want. Genmoji are generative emoji, and they work using Image Playground to create custom emoji to use in Messages. You can create Genmoji from descriptions, and, just like Image Playground above, your device presents several examples to choose from.

To create a Genmoji, tap or click the emoji keyboard when replying to a message in Messages. In the Describe an Emoji field, type a description for an emoji you would like to use.

Your device gives you examples matching your description, and you can swipe or click through them to choose the one you want. Tap Add to add the Genmoji to your library, then tap it to use it in your message. You’ll be able to reuse this Genmoji in the future.

Use Image Wand in Notes

Image Wand is available in the Notes app on iPad, in the Apple Pencil tool palette. It looks like a black magic wand with a glowing tip. Select this in the tool palette, then draw a circle on your note to invoke Image Playground.

You create images using Image Wand from text prompts. You can swipe through them and click Done if you want to use one. The image is inserted into your note, and you can adjust its size or modify it using the Apple Pencil. You can also use Image Wand without an Apple Pencil, on an iPad or an iPhone. Just tap the tool palette icon, select Image Wand, and draw a circle with your finger.

You can also use Image Wand to create images from text in notes. Rather than type a prompt in the Image Wand interface, type text in your note, invoke Image Wand, then draw a circle in a blank section of your note.

Image Wand isn’t currently available on Mac, though it’s likely that Apple will add this in the future. Image Wand will also be available in other apps, such as Freeform, Pages, Keynote, and third-party apps will be able to integrate this framework.

While Apple’s generative image tools are limited compared to other such tools, they are just enough to create fun images and emoji to make your documents and messages a bit more interesting. They suffer from all the limitations of AI image generation, so you may find these useful, or just a way to create some silly images.

 

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