Where are emojis stored on Macs?

I saw the iPhone emoji and I want to get a high quality image of it to turn into the space grey color, but I can't find an image on the Internet. Does anyone know where the image file for the emoji is stored?

I am using OS X Yosemite.

Thanks.

Solution 1:

Emojis are handled like any other fonts, the corresponding font file is stored in /System/Library/Fonts/Apple Color Emoji.ttc. So there are no images per se which you could reuse (even ignoring any potential copyright problems).

Three options on how to get emoji images (without programming a little tool to parse the font file directly):

• use the Character Viewer as described in this answer and a screen grabber to get an image from the emoji you are interested in
• use Font Book to look at the characters/glyphs available in "Apple Color Emoji"
• use Google Image Search to find bigger image file representing the emoji you need