Making text readable on any photo
The most common problem with captions is contrast. White text disappears on a bright sky and black text vanishes in shadows, and most photos have both. Three settings solve it:
- Outline. A dark stroke around light letters (or the reverse) keeps every edge visible. Around 5–8% of the font size works for bold captions; go lower for thin fonts.
- Drop shadow. A soft shadow lifts text off the background without the hard look of an outline, which suits titles and quotes.
- Placement. Drag text onto calm areas such as sky or a wall, not across faces or detail.
Keep it short. A caption read on a phone in one glance usually works best at one or two lines. Use the wrap width slider to control where lines break instead of adding manual line breaks everywhere.
Size for the screen it will be seen on
Text that looks big on a laptop can be tiny in a phone feed. As a rough guide, keep the main caption at least 5–8% of the image height, and check it by shrinking your browser window. A date or credit can be smaller, as long as it stays legible.
How to make a classic meme
The traditional meme style is heavy, condensed, all-caps white lettering with a black outline, placed at the top and bottom of the picture. It was originally set in Impact, a font that ships with Windows and macOS but is not licensed for free redistribution and is missing on many phones.
The Meme preset uses Anton instead, an open-source typeface with a very similar tall, narrow shape. It creates two layers, TOP TEXT and BOTTOM TEXT, sized to about 11% of the image's shorter side. The top layer grows downward and the bottom layer grows upward as you type, so long captions never run off the edge.
Replace the words, then lower the size if your punchline is long. If you would rather add a small, faint credit across many photos, the watermark tool handles batches.
One caution: memes are often built on film stills or other people's photos. Copyright rules on reuse vary by country, so for anything commercial, use your own images or ones you have permission for.
PNG or JPG: which should you download?
Text has sharp edges, which is exactly where JPG compression struggles: fine outlines can pick up faint blocky noise at lower quality settings. PNG stores every pixel exactly, so the lettering stays crisp, but a large photo saved as PNG can be several times bigger.
A practical rule: choose PNG for graphics, screenshots, transparency or anything you might edit again; choose JPG at 85–95% quality for photos posted to social media or sent in a chat. Most platforms recompress uploads anyway. Our guide to PNG vs JPG explains the trade-off in more depth, and the image compressor can shrink the result further if a site has an upload limit.