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How to add text over a GIF animation?

· 2 min read
Vaishali Bhirud
Marketing & Sales

While a picture is worth a thousand words, sometimes an appropriate text on a picture is worth a lot more! A silly video clip with a witty caption bringing smile is priceless. But adding text is also useful in educational videos. They are useful when logging or resolving a support ticket with IT or customer service. Or to explain features in a product demo video.

There are many online free tools to add text to animated gif files. Most of them suffer from one or more of the following drawbacks

Text overflay on an animated gif

  1. Distracting ads
  2. Clunky and tedious UI making it hard to add multiple text elements spanning multiple frames
  3. Sluggish performance
  4. Buggy software
  5. Lack of privacy (your assets are already on some unknown server before you publish them!)

The ad-supported tools are especially bad given their desire to optimize for ad-revenue, they make you click multiple links, use JavaScript to refresh the ads frequently, disrupt your flow and thought process with inline banner ads and so on.

Because of all this, we decided to create an easy to use desktop app called GIF.ti that has an iMovie like interface to add text to any animated gif file. It has several advantages

  1. Built-in player can be used for live preview of your changes without having to export the gif file
  2. The thumbnail interface with text spans makes it easy to drag and resize the span of each text to one or more animation frames at the desired location. What is more, the automatically computed time duration of the text frame helps you decide wether it is on the screen for sufficient amount of time for your audience to read it before it is gone.
  3. Add text effects like those found in power point presentations
  4. All the settings are saved as a .gifti project making it possible to come back and edit the project based on feedback from your audience or clients.

GIFti is a freemium product. The free version is fully featured and the exported gif files contain a watermark. The watermark can be removed using the in-app purchases.