2026-08-29

Making planner stickers from your own photos — and where the background actually gets removed

A planner sticker inside Goodnotes is not a special file format. Strip away the marketplace packaging and it's a small image with a transparent background — a PNG whose empty pixels stay empty, so the washi-tape strip or the smiling corgi sits directly on the paper texture instead of inside a white rectangle. Goodnotes' own blog shows where they live: the Elements tool (“Tap Elements, then tap Elements again. You will find all editable sticker collections you have access to”), fed by dozens of sticker packs on the Goodnotes Marketplace — and, per Goodnotes' support docs, by anything of your own you add to a collection via the lasso tool's Add Element or via Add Photos / Import. Which is the interesting part. The packs are someone else's drawings. The stickers people actually want on a weekly spread are usually their own: the dog, the concert, the friend, the cake. Those start life as photos, and photos have backgrounds.

The step Goodnotes doesn't do — by its users' own account

Goodnotes has no built-in background remover. That's not an inference from a missing menu item; it's what Goodnotes users say on the company's own feedback forum, where a request titled “Remove background for images” asks for “the tool similar to the one they have on word (either the remove background, or set to transparent tool) for images” and sat at 300+ votes with no official status when this post was written. The comments describe the current workflow plainly: hop out of Goodnotes into some separate background-removal app, make the cutout, come back, import it. The removal step exists — it just happens somewhere else, in a tool each person has to pick for themselves.

What Apple already builds in, and where it stops

If your planner lives on an iPad or iPhone, part of that gap is already covered by the OS. Apple's own support guide documents it: open a photo, touch and hold the subject, and when the outline appears you can drag the lifted subject into another document or tap Add Sticker. It's free, it's on-device, and for a quick one-off it's genuinely good — if it covers your case, use it and skip the rest of this post. Its edges are real, though. It's an Apple-platform feature, and Goodnotes itself no longer lives only there — Goodnotes' own getting-started docs cover Android, Windows, and the web, none of which have a touch-and-hold subject lift. Apple's guide also notes the feature isn't supported on every model (the 8th-generation iPad is called out). And it's a single automatic pass: what the model grabs is what you get, with no brush to fix the spot where it kept half the sofa or dropped an ear.

Where an in-browser cutout fits

NearBG covers the same step from inside a browser tab, which makes it OS-indifferent: the same tool on an iPad, an Android tablet, or the Windows laptop running Goodnotes' desktop app. You pick one photo, an on-device segmentation model removes the background automatically, and — the part the one-tap OS trick doesn't offer — a touch-up brush with a size slider and a reset button lets you erase whatever the model got wrong before you download. The result is a transparent PNG at the original photo's resolution, and the photo never leaves the device: the model runs in the browser, so there's no upload, no account, and nothing for a third party to retain. If the planner is on your iPad, run NearBG in the iPad's own browser and the finished PNG lands in the same place the photo already was.

The cutout is NearBG's whole job: one photo in, one transparent PNG out, cleaned up with the brush. Turning that PNG into a reusable sticker — importing it into an Elements collection — happens inside Goodnotes, and sticker-sheet layout or resizing is a different tool's job entirely.

A start-to-finish route

Pick a photo where the subject stands apart from the background — even lighting and contrast give the segmentation model fewer edge pixels to guess wrong, the same advice this blog's hair-and-fur post explains in depth.
Run it through NearBG: automatic removal first, then zoom in and use the brush to erase any leftover background patch. The brush only removes — it can't paint back detail that was never separated, so a badly tangled edge may just need a different photo.
Download the PNG — and keep it a PNG. A JPEG can't store transparency; re-saving the cutout as JPEG quietly fills the empty pixels back in as a white box, the exact failure this blog's print-on-demand post documents on the printing side.
In Goodnotes, add it the way Goodnotes' own docs describe: import the image, then add it to an Elements collection so it's reusable across notebooks — that's the step that turns a one-off image into a sticker.
One photo at a time is the honest granularity: NearBG has no batch mode, so a twelve-sticker sheet means twelve passes. For one or two personal stickers a week, that's fine; for producing commercial sticker packs, a batch pipeline in a desktop editor is the better tool.

The honest summary

Everything here checks out against named, first-party sources: Goodnotes' own blog and support docs for what a sticker technically is and where it lives (the Elements tool), Goodnotes' own feedback forum — 300+ votes and counting — for the fact that background removal isn't built in and users currently leave the app to do it, and Apple's own guide for the touch-and-hold subject lift that covers part of this on supported Apple hardware. NearBG's slot in that picture is the same narrow one as always: the background-removal step, in any browser on any OS, on-device, one photo at a time, with a brush for the model's mistakes — while the sticker-making itself, the importing and collecting and arranging, stays where it belongs, inside the planner app.