Meme Caption Generator

About Meme Caption Generator

This is a two-caption meme maker: top text and bottom text. It has two layouts. “Overlay” is the classic look, white letters with a black outline drawn over the picture, and you can drag each caption around. “Boxed” adds white bands above and below the image and puts the text there, so nothing in the photo is covered.

Text size starts from a maximum set as a share of the image's short side (4–30%, default 14%). If a caption is wider than 92% of the image or taller than 40% of it, the tool wraps at word boundaries (and between characters for Chinese and Japanese, which are written without spaces) and then shrinks the font a pixel at a time until it fits. The outline is 0–16% of the font size (default 7%). The result is saved at the original resolution as JPEG, PNG or WebP, defaulting to the original's format.

How Impact became the meme font

Impact was designed by Geoffrey Lee in 1965 for the Stephenson Blake type foundry in Sheffield, England, with posters and advertising in mind. Its heavy strokes and tight spacing pack large letters into a small area. Microsoft included it in the 1996 “Core fonts for the Web” package and shipped it with Windows, which made it the heaviest typeface most people already had when image macros took off in the early 2000s.

The white-fill, black-outline treatment has the same practical origin. Photos mix bright and dark areas, so single-color text vanishes somewhere. An outline keeps the letter shapes visible over any background. The default 7% outline works out to about 8.8 px on 126 px text.

Fonts depend on your device

The tool does not download a web font; it uses whatever is installed. Windows and macOS have Impact, but many Android phones do not, and there the browser substitutes another bold sans-serif. The same caption can therefore look different depending on where you make the meme. If the look matters, make it on a desktop.

Impact also only covers Latin-based scripts. Captions in Korean, Japanese, Chinese or other scripts are drawn with a fallback font for those characters, so mixed text can combine two typefaces. The uppercase option only changes letters that have case.

Overlay or boxed

Overlay keeps the original dimensions, which is convenient when a site crops to a fixed ratio, but it can cover faces or the detail the joke depends on. Because each caption can take up to 40% of the height, long top and bottom captions can meet in the middle.

Boxed never covers the picture but makes the canvas taller. Lines are spaced at 1.15× the font size, with padding of 40% of the font size above and below each band. A landscape image with several lines of text can end up close to square, so check the final ratio if you are posting somewhere that crops.

Writing captions that read at thumbnail size

Memes are mostly seen small, in a feed or chat. Every extra word forces the tool to shrink the text, and past about two lines per caption it becomes hard to read on a phone. The classic setup puts the premise on top and the punchline on the bottom; if the bottom caption needs a full sentence of setup, the joke probably belongs in a post rather than on the image.

Explicit line breaks are respected. If automatic wrapping splits a phrase awkwardly, add your own break where the pause should be.

Using other people's images

Movie stills, TV screenshots and photos taken by someone else are almost always copyrighted. Whether adding a caption for commentary or parody is allowed depends on the country. In the United States, fair use is decided case by case by weighing four factors: the purpose and character of the use, the nature of the original work, how much was used, and the effect on the market for the original. Other countries use narrower lists of exceptions, such as quotation or parody.

Sharing a meme with friends and using it in an advertisement or on merchandise are treated very differently. For anything commercial, use photos you took yourself or images whose license clearly allows it. A recognizable person's face can raise publicity or privacy rights separate from copyright.

Worked examples

How to use it

1. Load an image and choose overlay or boxed.
2. Type the top and bottom captions and adjust font, size, color and outline.
3. In overlay mode drag the captions into place, then pick the output format and quality and download.

Frequently asked questions