Add text to an image online

Putting words on a picture without a design app

Most of the time you do not need Photoshop or Canva — you need one line of text, in a readable colour, in the right corner, exported at the original resolution. That is what this page does. It opens with a single caption box, a normal sans-serif face, no outline and a soft drop shadow: the settings that look deliberate on a photograph rather than shouty.

Step by step

1. Drop in the photo, screenshot or graphic.
2. Type your text into the box on the right. Press Enter inside it for a deliberate line break; long lines wrap automatically at the wrap-width you set.
3. Drag the text on the canvas to place it. Keyboard users can select the box and use the arrow keys.
4. Set the colour, and add either an outline or a drop shadow so the text survives whatever is behind it.
5. Press Add text box for each further label — a title and a credit line, for instance, can have completely different settings.

Making text readable over any background

The single most common mistake is white text on a photo that turns out to be white in one corner. Three techniques fix it, and you can combine them:

• Outline. A dark stroke at 5–10% of the font size traces every letter. It is the most reliable option over busy detail such as foliage or a crowd.
• Drop shadow. Softer and more editorial. It lifts light text off a mid-tone background without the comic-book look of an outline.
• A bar. Use the white-space sliders to add a solid band above or below the photo and put the text there. Nothing beats it for legibility, and it keeps the image itself unobstructed.

Choosing a size that survives the feed

Size is set as a percentage of image height, not in pixels, so the same setting looks identical whether your source is 800 px or 6000 px tall. As a rule of thumb: 3–4% for a discreet credit or watermark, 6–8% for a caption that should be read at a glance, and 10% or more for a headline meant to be legible as a thumbnail.

Fonts come from your device, never from a CDN

The font list offers the families that ship with Windows, macOS, iOS and Android. We do not fetch Google Fonts or any other remote typeface, because that would be a network request on a page whose whole promise is that it makes none. The practical consequence is that a font your device lacks will fall back to the next best match in the same stack — so a design you make on a Mac may render slightly differently if you reopen the same settings on Android. The exported image, of course, is fixed: once the text is drawn into the pixels it looks the same everywhere.

Watermarking, honestly

A drawn watermark is a deterrent, not protection. It raises the effort needed to reuse your photo without credit, and it means a screenshot still carries your name — but anyone who wants to remove it can crop, clone or inpaint it. If your goal is provenance rather than deterrence, keep an untouched original with its EXIF intact somewhere safe, and publish the marked copy. (Conversely, if you want to strip identifying data before publishing, use Remove EXIF Data.)

After you export

PNG keeps text edges perfectly crisp and is the right choice for screenshots and flat graphics; JPG is smaller for photographs. If the result needs to fit a size limit, compress it to 200 KB — a text overlay compresses cleanly, so the caption stays sharp even at a modest target. For a caption sitting under the image rather than on it, the meme generator has the white-bar preset ready to go.