Add Text to Image
Add custom text to any image with full control over font, size, color, position, and style. Perfect for creating memes, watermarks, or adding captions to your photos
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Compositing text onto an image
Adding text to an image draws glyphs directly into the pixel grid. Once exported, that text is part of the picture: it cannot be selected, searched, edited, or re-styled, and it scales with the image rather than with the reader's font settings. This is why the same words are handled very differently in a web page, where text stays text, and in a meme or a social graphic, where it must be burned in so it survives being copied around.
Legibility is the craft. Text placed over a photograph competes with everything behind it, so designers add contrast deliberately — a stroke or outline around the glyphs, a soft shadow, or a semi-transparent band behind the words. Font size needs to account for the final display: text that reads comfortably at full resolution can be unreadable in a feed thumbnail.
Why we built this tool
The uses are everywhere — social graphics and quote cards, memes, product images with a price flash, screenshots annotated with a label, thumbnails, and event posters.
The source images are often personal photos or unreleased marketing assets. Uploading them to an online editor for a task the browser can do natively is an unnecessary transfer, and free editors typically add their own branding to the export. Ours renders the text onto a canvas in your browser: your photo stays on your device, the output carries only your text, and there is no account or size limit involved.
Tips and common mistakes
- Preview at thumbnail size — text that reads at full resolution often disappears in a feed.
- Add a stroke, shadow, or backing bar whenever text sits over a photograph.
- Two typefaces at most, and keep them consistent across a set of graphics.
- Leave generous margins; platforms crop the edges of images more often than you would expect.
Quick start: using Add Text to Image
- Load the image you want to caption.
- Add your text and position it where it will not cover the subject.
- Choose the font, size, and colour, and add an outline or shadow if the background is busy.
- Preview at the size the image will actually be viewed.
- Export and download the finished image.
For arrows, boxes, and callouts rather than plain captions, Annotate Image is the better fit; Add Watermark to Image handles attribution marks.