Add Text to a GIF

How to add text to a GIF

1. Drop a GIF or a video on the frame above. GIFs keep their own frames and timing; videos get trim, width and frame rate controls.
2. Type a top line, a bottom line, or both. The preview updates as you type.
3. Pick a font and colors. Leave Text size on Auto unless you want something specific.
4. Want the text on only part of it? Choose Part of it under Show text and enter the seconds.
5. Press Make GIF, then download it or share it from your phone.

Fonts, outline and readable captions

A caption has one job: be readable on every frame, over whatever happens to be behind it. Bright sky, black hoodie, a flash of white. That’s why meme text is white with a black outline. One of the two colors always contrasts with the background.

Outline width sets how far the outline reaches outside the letters, from 0 to 8 px. Four is a good default at 480 px. Go thicker on busy footage, thinner on small GIFs where a fat outline eats the letter shapes.

Auto size picks the biggest text that fits, up to 18% of the GIF’s height or 12% of its width, whichever is smaller. The width limit is our own addition: without it, a tall phone video gets letters a fifth of the screen high. A long line breaks onto a second line before it shrinks, and it breaks where the two lines come out closest in length, so you don’t get one stray word dangling underneath. If even the smallest size can’t fit it in two lines, the page tells you.

Here’s the part most caption tools get wrong. A GIF stores at most 256 colors per palette, and an ordinary encoder picks them from the picture alone. Your exact white might not make the cut, so the text comes out slightly off and speckled where the encoder dithered it. We reserve two palette slots for the text color and the outline color and write every solid text pixel with that exact color. We checked this by decoding our test GIFs frame by frame: every solid caption pixel came back exactly the color that was picked.

Text on part of the GIF

Captions often work better with timing. The reaction lands after the setup; the punchline shows up on the last second. Choose Part of it and set From and To in seconds. On a GIF, the text goes on every frame that starts inside that window. On a video, use the video’s own clock, the same seconds you see in the trim fields. The preview hides the text outside the window while the video plays.

One range covers both lines. If you want the top line first and the bottom line later, make the GIF twice: once with the top line, then drop the result back in and add the bottom one with its own range.

Examples

Both made with this page. The cat is our own drawing, already a transparent GIF, and it stays transparent with the caption on top.