Add text to a GIF for your
reaction., group chat., meme.
Upload a GIF, write your top and bottom text, download. Classic meme captions, or text that types itself onto the GIF. Free, no watermark, and your file never leaves your device.
Your file stays on your device. Large GIFs are scaled to 640 px on the long side.
Built for the complaints people actually have.
Every frame keeps playing
The GIF is decoded frame by frame, with its own timing and disposal, and your text is drawn on each one. Nothing freezes, nothing skips.
Captions that read on anything
White Impact with a black outline is the default because it reads on light and dark frames alike. Change the font, fill and outline whenever you like.
Text that types itself on
Choose Types in and the caption writes itself over the loop. Short GIFs repeat so the sentence has time to finish.
Private by design
Your GIF is opened by your own browser. It isn’t uploaded to a server, so there’s no queue, no account and no file left behind.
From words to GIF in a minute.
- 1
Upload a GIF, or drop it onto the preview. A photo works too: the text animation makes it move.
- 2
Write the top text, the bottom text or both, and choose whether the words stay on, type in or fade in.
- 3
Pick the font, size and colours, then download your GIF with the text on every frame.
Captioning a GIF in your browser
Adding text to a GIF means drawing the same words on every frame and saving the frames again with their original timing. This tool does that on your device: it opens the GIF, reads each frame, draws your caption on top and writes a new GIF. The file isn’t sent to a server, so a 5 MB GIF is ready as fast as your computer can encode it, and a private joke stays private.
Top text, bottom text
The layout is the meme one: a line across the top, a line across the bottom, or just one of them. Long captions wrap onto as many lines as they need, and the size is set as a share of the image width, so the same setting looks right on a small sticker and a wide clip. The default is white Impact in capitals with a black outline. It’s a cliché for a reason: frames in a GIF change from light to dark, and outlined white is the only combination that stays readable on all of them. Switch the outline or the capitals off, or pick another font, when you want a subtitle and not a meme.
Captions that type themselves
Most caption tools stamp the words on and leave them. Here you can choose Types in, and the caption writes itself letter by letter across the first part of the loop, then holds. Fades in brings the whole caption up over the first quarter. A GIF that lasts less than about two and a half seconds is repeated until there’s enough time for the sentence to finish, so the download is a little longer than the original and still loops cleanly.
The same options work on a still image. Upload a photo or a screenshot, pick Types in, and you get an animated GIF of your words appearing on it.
What it doesn’t do
You can’t drag the text to an arbitrary spot, show different captions on different frames, or add stickers. If you need subtitles that change through the clip, ezgif’s frame ranges are the right tool, and the guide to adding text to a GIF walks through it step by step, along with Canva, Adobe Express and the phone routes. GIFs larger than 640 pixels on the long side are scaled down to 640, which keeps the file a size chat apps will accept.
File size
A captioned GIF is usually bigger than the one you started with. Every frame is re-encoded with its own 256-colour palette, and sharp-edged text adds detail that GIF compression handles badly. If the result has to travel by text message, where carriers squeeze anything large, start from a shorter or smaller GIF. The guide to sending a GIF in a text has the numbers.
Questions
Something else? Email hello@typingtextgif.com.