ElkArte Community Modern, Free, Powerful
Community building forum software

The default smilies supplied are tiny and my users are complaining! They LOVE smilies/emoticons/emojis whatever they are called

Unlike in phpbb there is no option to set their size in settings or when adding one. [I can only add one at a time! What is that about?]

I found an emoji add-on but it failed to work. It installed correctly but instead of showing them it listed their codes. I'm using the most current Elk by the way. I can't seem to find any more smilie addons.

Even if I have to add them individually is it possible to add phpbb ones or bespoke ones myself please?

In Admin try this

Thanks. I am getting in a muddle with smilie management. I tried creating a new set and it said not found! I tried deleting the default set but it had no effect. I ticked allow customisation and went back to smilies but now new posts show a thousand smilie codes at the top!!

In FTP the server smilies directory only has the handful of smilies in it so I don't know where all these codes are coming from!

I did manage to add a new smilie but still get that list of smilie codes. In Firefox it looks like this and in Edge it takes up three pages!!

So the bottom line is how do I manage and add smilies sets please?

"Sets" are meant to be alternative smiley that the user can select, pretty much the equivalent of a different theme.
To add new smiley, yes, you have to add them one by one (anyway you have to specify the code one by one, so...).
The emoji addon looks like has something to do with the url set, maybe @Spuds has an idea?

Or replace the smileys in your /public_html/smileys/default with your desired smileys. Make sure you replace rather than adding new smiley in the path.

Smiley already have  quite a good flexibility, there is not much more "in general" that can be done (maybe a mass-upload, but... meh).
For emoji there are already other topics like:
https://www.elkarte.net/community/index.php?topic=4695.0
so I'll close this one as duplicate.