Add a caption to a GIF

How to add a caption to a GIF

Four steps, all of them on this page.

• Drag your .gif onto the box above, or click it to pick a file.
• Type the caption. There are two boxes, one for the top and one for the bottom, and you can use either or both.
• Pick a style — a white caption bar above the picture, meme capitals over it, or a subtitle band inside it — then set the text size.
• Press the button and download the finished GIF when the progress bar fills.

The animation is kept

Most ways of putting text on a GIF quietly flatten it. Open one in an image editor and you usually get frame one, so what comes out is a still picture with a .gif extension and none of the movement the file existed for.

This tool rebuilds the animation instead. A GIF does not store whole pictures — each frame is a patch of changed pixels layered onto what the previous frame left behind, according to that frame's disposal method — so every frame is reassembled into a full picture, captioned, and written back out with its original delay. The result plays at the speed and length you started with, and loops the way it did.

Very short frame delays are the one deliberate change. A large number of GIFs declare 0 or 10 milliseconds per frame and rely on the browser to clamp that to about 100; writing the declared value back out faithfully would play those several times faster than the file you dropped in, so anything under 20ms is normalised.

Meme text, caption bar or subtitle

The three styles answer different jobs, and the difference that matters is whether the caption covers any of the picture.

• Meme text draws outlined white capitals over the top and bottom of the frame, in a heavy condensed face. The dimensions do not change and some of the picture is covered — this is the style the format is known for, and it is what the tool opens with.
• Caption bar adds a white strip above the GIF and puts black text in it. The canvas grows to make room, so every pixel of the original is still visible, which is the reaction-GIF and news-clip look.
• Subtitle puts the words on a translucent dark band inside the bottom of the frame, which is what a burned-in subtitle looks like on video.

Why a captioned GIF can come out larger

A GIF can only hold 256 colours per frame, and every frame here is re-quantized to a fresh palette after the caption is drawn. That usually looks better than the original and sometimes weighs more, especially on a GIF that was heavily optimised — the original may have been storing tiny patches of changed pixels per frame where this writes complete ones.

If the result is too heavy for where you are posting it, the effective controls are the source file rather than the caption: a shorter clip, smaller dimensions or fewer frames all cut it sharply. The caption itself adds very little, and the caption bar adds a strip of flat white, which compresses almost to nothing.