How the captions are drawn
The image is painted at its full original size, and the two captions are drawn on top. Text is converted to uppercase, set in bold with the font stack Impact, "Arial Narrow", system-ui, sans-serif, filled white and outlined in black. The font size is a percentage of the image height (3 to 25, default 9, never below 16 px at the start). The outline thickness is max(2, fontSize / 12) pixels with rounded joins, which is what keeps the letters legible on both light and dark areas. The finished meme downloads as meme.png; there is no format choice.
Worked example
An 800 by 600 image at the default 9 percent: round(600 x 9 / 100) = 54 px font, a 21.6 px margin, a 4.5 px outline and a wrap width of 800 x 0.92 = 736 px. Each extra line adds 54 x 1.1 = 59.4 px. A single-line bottom caption has its baseline at y = 578.4. If it wraps to two lines, the second line stays at 578.4 and the first moves up to 519, so bottom captions grow upward and never fall off the picture.
Wrapping, fitting and font differences
Captions are split on whitespace and a word moves to the next line when the line would exceed 92 percent of the image width. A single word wider than that (a long URL, say) is broken across lines by characters so it stays inside the picture. If the two captions together would be taller than the image, the font is shrunk step by step (down to 8 px) until they fit without touching, so a short, wide picture still gets readable captions. Leaving a caption empty skips it, which is how you make a single-caption meme.
| Platform | Font you are likely to get |
|---|---|
| Windows, macOS | Impact, which is installed by default |
| Android, many Linux systems | Usually a fallback such as Arial Narrow or the system sans-serif |
| iOS | Impact is generally available, but check the preview |
Because the font comes from the device and not from a download, the same meme can look slightly different on different machines. What the preview shows is exactly what the PNG contains.
Common mistakes
- Setting the size too high on a short, wide image makes the tool shrink the text below the size you chose so the top and bottom captions do not overlap. If the result looks small, shorten the captions.
- Using a huge photo gives a huge PNG, since the file is not downscaled. Resize first with the image resizer for chat apps.
- Typing in lowercase is fine; the tool capitalises it for you.
- For a logo or credit line rather than a joke, use the watermark tool, and combine photos first with the collage maker for multi-panel memes.