Chrome for Android partially supports inserting stickers, GIFs, and images from the keyboard

Chrome for Android now technically supports inserting stickers, GIFs, and images directly from the keyboard into text fields on websites.

However, there are several caveats to that statement. For one, it only works on Chrome Stable and Beta if you enable a specific flag. On Canary, it’s currently an A/B test, and not everyone has the ability to insert rich media into text fields. Another caveat is that not all websites support it for now, even with the flag enabled. It’s a long-standing limitation on Chrome, which is being partially addressed now.

Until recently, Chrome for Android actually prevented keyboards from inserting this content into sites. Users got a message that said, “This app does not support GIFs here.” It’s worth noting that Chrome is nowhere near the first to implement this. Mozilla’s Firefox has supported the insertion of such media for years on Android.

The experimental flag responsible for enabling this feature is “Enable IME media insertion.” The description says that it enables IMEs to insert media content such as images, GIFs, and stickers. This flag is actually not recent. It was added back in October 2025, but it was also completely non-functional at the time. If the flag was enabled, the error notification wouldn’t appear, but the file would not get inserted into the text fields either.

Now, the feature sees success on some websites. To try out this feature on your preferred websites, you’ll need to head over to chrome://flags on Beta or Stable, and search for “IME media insertion.” Set it to Enabled, and restart the browser. Then, you can open a supported site and use the keyboard’s insertion tools directly. As mentioned before, the results are inconsistent and vary by site.

The implementation remains incomplete for now, and there’s also no official statement from Google about an ETA or rollout timeline.

I tried it on Reddit, with the flag enabled (on Chrome Stable). While I don’t get any error message, the GIFs or stickers that I select simply refuse to show up in the text field, so it’s still not working on that site.

I checked on Chrome Canary as well. Here, it straight-up throws me the same “media unsupported…” type of error message, implying that the A/B test has not reached me yet on Chrome Canary.

Interestingly enough, the “IME media insertion” flag has been completely removed from Chrome Canary.

Information about this flag and the feature was initially posted by @Leopeva64 on X, and the post has been attached below for your reference. It also includes some relevant media.

In other Chrome news, the browser wants to be the bridge between your digital IDs and your phone wallet. More on that here.

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