Add Text to Any Photo

Readable text

Make text readable on a busy photo

Text on a photo fails for one reason more than any other: it blends into the picture. White words disappear into a bright sky, and dark words sink into shadows. The fix is contrast, and the panel gives you four ways to get it.

• Outline — A thin dark outline around white text, or the reverse, keeps every letter readable on any background. This is the classic meme and thumbnail look.
• Shadow — Soft lifts the words gently off the photo. Hard gives a crisp offset that still reads at small sizes.
• Weight and size — Bold, larger text survives being shrunk into a phone feed. Thin text needs a calm background behind it.
• Placement — Put the words where the photo is quiet: open sky, a plain wall, an empty table. Drag the text there before you style it.

Check the result at the size people will see it. Zoom out until the image is as small as it will appear in a feed. If you can still read it, it works.

Add or replace

New text on top, or the old text gone first

Most add-text tools can only put words on top of a picture. That is fine for a photo with nothing written on it. It falls apart when the picture already says something you want to change: a new price typed over an old one just leaves two prices.

PixText detects the text that is already in your image when you upload it. Click an old line to retype it in place, or paint over it with the erase brush, and the background behind it is rebuilt. Then add your own words wherever you like. Both jobs happen in one editor, on one image, in one download.

Fonts

47 fonts for captions, titles and memes

The fonts are grouped so you can find a style fast: Sans, Rounded, Display, Condensed, Serif, Slab, Script, Handwriting and Mono. Every name in the list is drawn in its own typeface, so you see what you are picking.

• Meme captions — Anton is a free stand-in for Impact. Set it in white with a black outline.
• Titles — Bebas Neue, Oswald and League Gothic are tall and narrow, so big words fit across the image.
• Personal notes — Caveat, Patrick Hand and Kalam look handwritten. Great Vibes and Dancing Script suit invitations and cards.
• Clean labels — Inter, Roboto and Open Sans stay clear at small sizes.

The fonts cover Latin-script languages such as English, Spanish, French and Indonesian. You can type other scripts as well, but they fall back to a system font, and the editor tells you when the chosen font is missing a character.

Limits

What it doesn't do (yet)

PixText is built around the text in a picture, not around designing from a blank page. A few things it leaves to other tools:

• No background band or transparency — Text sits straight on the photo; use an outline or a shadow to keep it readable.
• One style per box — A box has one font, size and colour. For a single word in another colour, use a second box.
• No curved text, stickers or templates — For a layout built from scratch, a design app is the better fit.
• Files up to 10 MB — JPG, PNG and WebP. Images over 4096 px on the long edge are scaled down to that size.