Make a meme from your own picture

The classic look, step by step

The classic meme caption is white Impact in capitals with a thick black outline around every letter. The outline is what keeps it readable on any picture, light or dark. Impact comes with Windows, so it is in Octoolo's font list already.

With Capitals ticked you can type in normal case and the letters still come out in capitals. Make the outline about a twentieth of the letters' height: on a 1080-pixel picture with large captions, 6 to 8 pixels looks right. For a long line, drag a box across the picture's width with the Text tool before you type, and the words wrap inside it.

Fancy a twist? Change the letter color, swap the outline for a Shadow, or pick another bold font. Any font on your PC is fair game.

Bring your own picture

Octoolo has no library of meme templates and no search for famous images. You use your own: a photo from your phone, a picture you have the right to use, or a screenshot. That suits the memes that land best in a group chat anyway, the ones about your own friends, pets and office. Pictures found online usually belong to someone, so for anything you post publicly, your own photos are the safe choice.

To use a screenshot, press Win Print Screen; Windows saves it in your Pictures folder, under Screenshots, ready to open. Or press Win Shift S and paste it straight into the Photo Editor with Ctrl V. Then crop it to the part that matters, the message or the reaction, so it can be read on a phone.

A chat screenshot often shows names, numbers or faces of people who never asked to be in a meme. Select them and add Filter › Pixelate before you export; the pixelate image page shows how.

Captions that land

• Keep it short. One line on top, one at the bottom. If it needs three rows, it needs fewer words.
• Setup on top, punchline below. People read top to bottom, so give them the twist last.
• Keep faces clear. The expression in the picture is half the joke. Put captions over the sky, the wall or the floor.
• Go big. Memes are mostly seen on phones, small. Make the letters as large as the line allows.
• Point at the detail. A circle drawn with the Shapes tool (U), with a stroke and no fill, shows people where to look.
• Crop the dead space. A tight crop around the subject makes the reaction bigger; see crop image.
• Read it small. Zoom out until the picture is about phone size and look again. If the caption is hard to read there, make it bigger or shorter.

Still pictures, and a caption bar

The Photo Editor exports still pictures: JPG, PNG or WebP. A GIF opens as its first frame only, so animated memes are not made here. For a moving one, the Video Editor can add text to a video clip and export it as a GIF; the video to GIF page explains the export.

The other popular style puts black words on a white bar above the picture. Choose Image › Canvas size…, set Picture stays at to the bottom center and add height, which all goes on top. Add a white color fill layer with Layer › New fill layer, send it to the back, and type in black on the bar.

For a still meme, JPG is the right choice for photos: small and accepted by every chat app and site. Export as PNG instead when the picture is a screenshot full of small text, which JPG would smudge. Either way, the captions are drawn at the full size of the exported picture, so they stay sharp.