Text that lives in the pixels, not on the platform
There are two ways to put words on a GIF. The first is to let a platform do it: Instagram stickers, TikTok captions, the text field some app floats over your clip. That text lives in the app, not in the file, so the moment your GIF gets saved and reposted somewhere else, the words are gone and the joke shows up naked. The second way is to burn the text into the frames themselves, which is the entire point of a gif maker with text.
What the GIF does the burning in your browser. Drag in any video your browser can play (mp4, mov, webm, avi, mkv, m4v), trim it to the moment, type your captions, and export. The words become pixels, and pixels travel. Post the GIF in Slack, a README, a group chat, or an email, and it says the same thing everywhere.
Meme style or clean style, your call
You get up to three captions per GIF, and each one picks its own style. Meme style is the classic: Impact-look lettering, white fill, thick black outline, automatically uppercased, and it wraps itself when your line runs long. It stays readable on top of any footage because that exact combination was stress-tested by two decades of the internet. If that is the energy you're after, the video meme generator page goes deeper.
Clean style is for everything that should not look like a meme: product demos, tutorials, a label on a screen recording. It uses the site's brand font and hands you a color picker, so the text can match whatever palette the GIF is landing in.
- Up to 3 captions per GIF, each styled, placed, and timed on its own.
- Meme style: Impact-look, white with a black outline, uppercase, auto-wraps.
- Clean style: brand font plus a color picker.
- Position: top, bottom, or drag it anywhere on the preview.
Timing is most of the joke
Every caption has an optional timing window: show from one second mark to another. Leave it blank and the text sits on the whole GIF. Set it and you can build an actual beat, with the setup landing in the first second and the punchline arriving only after the reaction does. Three captions with three windows is enough structure for a real bit.
It works across cuts, too. You can sequence up to three clips into one GIF (each keeps its own trim and crop, and the cuts are hard cuts, no transitions), and a caption can run right across the seam. That is how you get the setup-then-reaction format in a single file. The combine videos into one GIF page covers the sequencing half.
Keep the type readable when the file gets small
Text is the first thing to die when a GIF gets over-compressed, so a few numbers help. Keep captions short; five or six words a line beats a paragraph. Meme style survives almost anything, because a white letter with a black outline holds its edge even down at 64 colors. Clean style in a low-contrast color needs more care, so use the picker with the background in mind.
- 12 to 15 fps is plenty. Text does not need 30 frames a second to be legible.
- Keep the width around 480 to 640px. Tiny type at 320px turns into a smudge.
- Crop to the ratio you actually need (1:1, 9:16, 4:5, 4:3, 16:9) so the caption is not fighting dead space.
- Watch the live size estimate while you adjust colors and dithering, and aim under roughly 2MB for chat apps.
If the estimate refuses to come down, the small GIF checklist walks through every lever in order.
Typed here, never uploaded
Everything happens inside the tab: the decode, the captions, the encode. Your video never leaves your machine, and neither does whatever you typed on it, which matters more than usual when the caption is an inside joke about a coworker or a label on a confidential demo. Once the page has loaded you can go offline and it keeps working, because there is no server on the other end.
It is also free the boring way: ad-supported, no signup, no email, no watermark on the export, and no server-imposed cap on file size. Open the converter, put the words on the moment, and get on with your day.