The short answer
Drop a photo into the tool below or paste it with Ctrl+V. A first text layer with the words Your text appears in the middle; type your own text in the Text field. Drag the text on the picture to move it, pull the round handle at its corner to make it larger and turn it with the handle above it. Choose a Font, a Color and the Alignment, then add an Outline, a Shadow or a Box behind the text if it is hard to read. Press Download, and the photo is saved with the text at its original width and height.
For a second line in another style, press Add text. Each text is a separate layer with its own settings; click it on the picture or in the list of text layers to change it. Duplicate copies a finished text including its style, which saves time for several labels that should look the same.
Try it here: Add Text to Image
Open the full tool pageMake text readable on any picture
Text on a photo competes with everything behind it. The most common mistake is white text over a sky or dark text over shadows, where some letters disappear. Three settings solve this, and you can combine them.
- Outline draws a contour around every letter. A thin dark outline under white text works on almost any photo, the classic look of subtitles and memes.
- Shadow places a soft dark glow behind the letters. It is less visible than an outline and looks calm on portraits and travel photos.
- Box behind the text puts a rounded panel under the words. Lower the Box opacity to let the photo show through, the look of captions in videos and news graphics.
- Place text over quiet areas such as sky, walls, water or a blurred background rather than over faces and detailed patterns.
Fonts, size and alignment
The tool uses the fonts already installed on your device, grouped into styles: sans serif for clean modern text, serif for invitations and quotes, condensed for long headlines, rounded for friendly posts, handwritten for cards, monospace for a technical look and Impact for bold titles. Because nothing is downloaded, the exact font can differ between a computer and a phone; the style stays the same.
Size is shown in pixels of the original photo. As a rule of thumb, a headline should be about a tenth of the picture height, a caption a twentieth, and nothing smaller than about 2 percent of the height if the photo will be seen on a phone. Lines you break with Enter stay as they are, and Alignment sets whether they line up on the left, in the center or on the right.
| Use | Font style | Readability helper |
|---|---|---|
| Birthday or wedding invitation | Serif or handwritten | Soft shadow |
| Product photo label | Sans serif, bold | White box at 80 percent |
| Slide or presentation title | Condensed or sans serif | Dark box at 60 percent |
| Social post quote | Serif, italic | Outline or shadow |
| Bold headline | Impact, all caps | Black outline |
Keep the photo quality
The preview fits the screen, but the download is drawn again at the full resolution of the photo. A 48 megapixel phone picture stays 48 megapixels, and the text is as sharp as the photo itself. Phone pictures that were taken sideways are shown and saved the right way up, because their rotation is read from the file.
Same as original keeps JPG, PNG and WebP in their own format. HEIC photos from iPhones are saved as JPG, because browsers cannot write HEIC. JPG and WebP are saved at high quality (92), which looks identical to the eye; choose PNG if the picture is a graphic with flat colors or must keep transparent areas.
Text, watermark or meme?
Adding text is the right tool when every picture gets its own words: a caption, a date, a price, an invitation. If you want to put the same name or logo on many photos at once, use the watermark tool, which handles whole sets of pictures. For jokes with classic top and bottom captions and comparison layouts, the meme generator is quicker. All three run in your browser without uploading anything.
Common problems
If the text looks blurry in a messaging app, the app has compressed the picture; send it as a file or a document instead. If the text is cut off at the edge, drag it inward: layers can be moved past the border, and anything outside the picture is not saved. If a font looks different than expected, your device lacks the font and uses a similar one. The text cannot be edited after downloading, so keep the page open until you are happy with the result.