Add text to image online - captions with outline and shadow

The key is contrast between the letters and what is behind them. On busy photos (sky, leaves, crowds) three techniques work best:

• Shadow - a soft, semi-transparent glow under the letters; on by default and it does not change the letter shapes.
• Outline - a stroke around the letters, e.g. white text with a black outline of 8-12% of the font size, the classic meme and video-thumbnail look. The slider goes up to 30%.
• Bold and larger size - text at least 4-5% of the image width stays legible after social networks shrink the picture.

Text size is set as a percentage of the image width (1-30%, default 7%), so a caption keeps its proportions whether the photo is 1000 or 6000 px wide.

You can choose Inter (loaded by the site, always available) or common system fonts: Arial, Verdana, Trebuchet, Georgia, Times New Roman, Courier New, Impact and Comic Sans. If a font is missing on your device (Impact on many Android phones, for instance), the browser substitutes a similar one - the preview always shows exactly what ends up in the file. Accented letters such as é, ü, ñ, ł and other Unicode characters, including emoji, are supported as long as the font contains them.

Use “Duplicate” to copy a styled layer and change only its text - handy for a title plus subtitle in the same style.

PNG is lossless and keeps letter edges crisp - best for graphics, screenshots and images with a lot of text; transparency is preserved. JPG (92% quality) gives a file several times smaller for photos published online; transparent areas become white. The image keeps its original resolution (images larger than 8000 px on the long side are scaled down to 8000 px), and saving removes EXIF metadata such as GPS location. To make the file smaller afterwards, use the image compressor; to change its dimensions, the image resizer. Need text on a document instead? Try add text to PDF.