Add Text to a Photo

How it works

1. 1Drop a photo onto the box above, or paste one with Ctrl+V.
2. 2Type your text. Press enter for a second line, and it wraps on its own if a line gets too long for the picture.
3. 3Pick a font, a size and a color, then drag the text on the image to place it.
4. 4Add an outline or a shadow if the words are hard to read, then download at full resolution.

Common use cases

• Captioning a photo for Instagram, a story or a group chat.
• Making a meme, which is what the Anton font and a black outline are for.
• Putting a quote or a name over a picture for a card or an invitation.
• Labeling a screenshot or a diagram so somebody knows what they are looking at.
• Adding a date or a place to a photo before printing it.

Frequently asked questions

How do I add text to a photo?

Drop the photo above and type into the text box. The words appear on the picture straight away, and you drag them into place by clicking on the image. There is no account, no watermark, and nothing is uploaded: it all happens in your browser.

My text is hard to read over the photo. What do I do?

Turn up the outline. A photograph is light in some places and dark in others, so white text is legible over part of it and vanishes over the rest, which is why every caption on every platform has an outline behind it. Black outline under white text is the standard answer and it always works. A shadow is the gentler alternative: it lifts the words off a busy background without the hard edge, which looks less like a sticker on a detailed photo. Either one alone is usually enough, and both together is often too much.

Which font should I use?

Anton is the meme and poster face, and it is the closest thing on the web to Impact, which is what most people picture. Inter is clean and neutral for captions and labels. Oswald is condensed, so it fits more words across a narrow photo. Playfair is the elegant serif for invitations and quotes. Caveat looks handwritten. Mono suits timestamps, code and anything that should look mechanical. Six, because each one does something the others cannot, and thirty would be thirty downloads to make the same decision.

Can I use my own font?

Not here. Every font used has to be downloaded by your browser before the text can be drawn, so offering hundreds would make the page slow for everyone to serve a handful of people. If you need a specific typeface, the honest answer is that a desktop editor is the right tool for that job.

Will the download look exactly like the preview?

Yes, and it is worth explaining why it might not have. The preview is a scaled-down copy of your photo, so the text size, the outline width and the position all have to scale back up for the export. If any one of those is missed, the download comes back with the text a third of the size it looked or an outline so thin it disappears. Both are drawn by the same code at different scales here, so they cannot drift apart.

Can I add more than one piece of text?

One block at a time, and it can be several lines: press enter and the next line starts underneath. For two separate captions in different places, download the first one and drop the result back in to add the second.

Are my photos uploaded to a server?

No. The text is drawn in your own browser using the Canvas API. The file never leaves your device and nothing is stored.

Related tools

• Watermark ImageStamp text or a logo across one photo or a whole folder at once.
• Add an Outline to an ImagePut a border around a cut-out, the way a sticker has a white edge.
• Image CropperCrop an image freehand or to a fixed aspect ratio.

Understand what this does

Plain explanations of what is happening to your file, and what it costs you.

• PNG vs JPG: which should you use?Photographs are JPG, everything else is PNG, and the reason is one difference in how the two throw information away.