Add text to photo
Write a title, quote or price on a photo with fonts, colors, outlines and shadows.
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Write on a photo with real fonts and styles
Text turns a photo into a message: a quote, a sale announcement, a recipe title, a date on a travel picture or a caption on a meme. The text tool lets you add as many text layers as you need, drag them anywhere on the picture, and style each one with its own font, size, color, outline, shadow and background box.
Besides three system fonts (sans, serif and mono), the editor includes 16 display fonts under the SIL Open Font License, such as Playfair Display, Bebas Neue, Montserrat, Caveat and Pacifico. They load only when you pick them, so the page stays fast.
How to add text to a photo
Open the photo
Drop it on the box, choose it or paste it.
Add a text layer
The page starts with one layer, "Your text", near the bottom. Type your words, or press Add text for another layer.
Move and style it
Drag the text to its place, use the round handle to rotate and the square handle to resize, and choose font, color and effects. Guides snap the text to the center.
Export
Save the picture; the text becomes part of the image.
Text options
| Option | Use it to |
|---|---|
| Font and size | Set the tone: bold sans for announcements, script for invitations, serif for quotes |
| Color and opacity | Match your brand or a color in the photo |
| Background: Box or Per line | Make text readable on busy photos, like a label |
| Outline and shadow | Separate light text from a light background |
| Alignment, letter and line spacing | Fit longer quotes neatly into a block |
| Curve | Bend a word into an arc, upward or downward, for a badge-like title |
Making text readable on Instagram
- Size for a phone. Your post is often seen at about 400 pixels wide on a phone. Text that looks big on a laptop can be tiny there. As a rule of thumb, headline letters should be at least 5% of the image height.
- Contrast first. White text on a bright sky disappears. Add a shadow, an outline or a background box, or darken the photo slightly.
- Stay out of the edges in Stories. The top and bottom of a story are covered by the profile bar and the reply field. Meta's ad guidelines suggest keeping the top 14% and bottom 35% free of key text on 9:16 formats (Meta Ads Guide (opens in a new tab), checked November 2026); organic stories have no official figure, but the same margins are a safe guide.
- Fewer words. One short line on the picture and the rest in the caption works better than a paragraph on the image.
Want fancy letters in your caption or bio instead of on the picture? That is a different trick: the Instagram fonts generator converts text into Unicode styles you can copy and paste.
Text tool questions
Can I edit the text after saving?
Not in the saved image, because the text is merged into the pixels. Keep the editor open while you check the result, and undo or change the layer before exporting again.
Which fonts support my language?
Of the 16 display fonts, 15 cover Vietnamese, 13 cover Cyrillic and 3 cover Greek (EB Garamond, Manrope and Comfortaa). For other scripts, such as Arabic, Chinese or Thai, choose one of the system fonts, which use the fonts of your device.
Can I add text to a story background?
Yes. Crop or resize the photo to 9:16 first, or start from a story template that already has text boxes.
Can I use the fonts for a business post?
The included fonts carry open licenses that allow commercial use of images made with them.
Text and decoration
Text works together with stickers, frames and filters; see the photo editor tools overview for each of them.