Add text to GIF

Drop an animated GIF above and type your text. The page shows the first frame with your words straight away and then the finished GIF, playing, so you see exactly what you'll download. Pick where the text goes, the font, the size and the colors, then download the new GIF. The GIF never leaves your device.

On the GIF or in caption bars

• On the GIF puts the top text along the top of the picture and the bottom text along the bottom, the classic meme layout. White letters with a black outline stay readable over light and dark scenes alike; any other colors work too.
• Caption bars add a plain strip above the GIF for the top text and below it for the bottom text, so the words never cover anything in the picture. This is the captioned-GIF style, with dark text on a white bar unless you choose other colors. The GIF gets taller by the height of each bar.

Leave either box empty to use only one: a caption above, a punchline below, or both.

Font, size and colors

Choose Bold, a clean heavy sans serif and the easiest to read at a glance; Display, a geometric sans serif; Serif; or Typewriter, a monospaced font. Text size sets how large the words are compared with the GIF's width, from small to extra large. Long text wraps onto more lines by itself, and over the GIF it shrinks if it would otherwise cover most of the picture. Capital letters turns everything into capitals, the way meme text is often written.

The color fields set the text, the outline around text on the GIF, and the caption bars. For the best contrast, keep the outline darker than the text, or the other way round.

Covering text that's already there

Text that's already in a GIF can't be edited as text, because it is part of the frames' pixels. What you can do is cover it. With On the GIF, turn on Box behind the text: a solid band in the outline color sits behind your top and bottom text, hiding what was there before, and your new words go on top. Caption bars are the other way out: they leave the old text where it is and put the new words outside the picture.

What stays the same

• Every frame and its timing. The text is drawn once and added to each frame, and each frame keeps its own display time, so the GIF plays exactly as before.
• The loop. A GIF that loops forever still does; one that plays once still stops.
• The size. Text on the GIF keeps its width and height; caption bars add height only.
• Transparency. Transparent areas stay transparent unless the text or a bar covers them.

The new GIF has one table of colors for all its frames, made from the GIF's own colors and your text's. A GIF that uses up to 253 colors in all keeps every one of them exactly, and the soft edges of the letters take the nearest color in the table. With a few colors more, only the closest of them are merged; a GIF with many more, often one with a separate table for each frame, has its colors reduced to fit. The page shows the size of the new file next to the result; if it's too big for a chat app or a forum, run it through the GIF compressor.

More GIF tools

To write a message that types itself out letter by letter instead, use the typing text GIF maker. To turn a clip from your phone into a GIF first, use video to GIF; to build one from photos, the GIF maker.