Add Text to GIF Online

Writing on a GIF is not the same as writing on a photo. A GIF is a stack of separate images, so a caption has to be applied to every frame at the same position - otherwise it flickers or disappears halfway through the loop. This tool handles that for you: type once, and the text is burned into all frames.

How to Add Text to a GIF

1. Upload your GIF. One file, or several at once - multiple uploads are combined into a single GIF.
2. Write your text. A popup opens over the first frame. Type your caption, then pick a font, size and colour.
3. Position it, or add a caption bar. Drag the text where you want it, or add extra space above or below the frame.
4. Click Save Frames. The text is applied across every frame at that position.
5. Make the GIF and download. No watermark, no sign-up.

Text On the GIF, or a Caption Bar Above It?

There are two ways to caption a GIF and they suit different things. This is the choice most people get wrong, so it is worth thirty seconds of thought before you start typing.

For the caption bar, tick Add Extra Space On Top or On Bottom, set the height in pixels and choose a background colour. White with black text is the standard meme look; a bar around 80-120 px suits most GIFs.

Making the Text Readable

The background of a GIF moves, which is exactly what makes captions hard to read. A few things that reliably help:

• Find the still part of the frame. Play the GIF through and look for an area that stays roughly constant - a wall, the sky, a dark corner. Put the text there rather than over the subject.
• Go bigger than feels right. GIFs are usually viewed small in a chat window or feed. Text that looks oversized on the editing canvas is normally about right in situ. Start around 50 px on a 400 px wide GIF.
• Pick heavy fonts over thin ones. Condensed bold styles hold up against a busy moving background; light and script fonts disappear into it.
• Use the caption bar when in doubt. If the whole frame is busy, no colour choice will make overlaid text readable. Move it outside the picture instead.
• Keep it short. A GIF loops every couple of seconds. Anything longer than about eight words will not be finished before it restarts.

What Else You Can Do Here

• Combine multiple GIFs. Upload several files and they are merged into one GIF in the order you added them, so you can caption a sequence as a single output.
• Edit frames before captioning. Crop, rotate, flip and remove individual frames from the edit popup - useful for cutting a long GIF down to the moment the caption refers to.
• Add fade animations. Apply a fade-in or fade-out over a set number of seconds at the start or end of the GIF.
• Over 50 fonts. Including the heavy condensed styles used for classic meme captions.

If you need the full editing toolset rather than just captions, the GIF editor covers trimming, merging and frame reordering in more depth. To caption a video clip, convert it first with the video to GIF converter.

Size, Privacy and Cost

Everything runs in your browser - uploading, editing and rendering. Your GIF never leaves your computer, so there is no queue and nothing to delete afterwards. The tool is free with no watermark, no account and no cap on how many GIFs you caption.

One thing to expect: adding a caption bar makes the GIF taller, and every frame has to store those extra pixels, so the file grows. If that pushes you over an upload limit, run the finished GIF through the GIF compressor.

Frequently Asked Questions