Add Text to Photos with Photory

Photory is a social networking platform for storytelling with a simple-format captioned picture story, resembling a movie with subtitles. For the new reading experience, we’ve created a new writing tool that makes it easy for adding text, reusing photos for the adjacent scenes, and seeing how well your story is written between the scenes while making an edit.

To make an eye-catching photo with messages, there are some tricks associated with the science of visuality. The following are tips to consider when putting text to an image that helps maximize the visibility and value of your content.

● Contrast color

The most important quality on this topic is the text need to be readable, you need to make sure that its color is in high contrast with the image. If you have no background in art, trying to use a color wheel will help you in matching the opposite color.

● Add a border

Many times, the picture you choose has no one-dominant color and this is problematic in choosing the text color. The best practice is to add a border to texts, the most popular combination is the white text with a black border or vice versa, as it’s commonly used in a movie subtitle and most memes.

● Border width

If your image is a plain background picture with one-dominant color and has less detail, like a photo of sky, sea, desert, forest, it’s fine to go with a small border. But for an image that has a lot of detail like a city, a crowd, or cars, a bold border is needed for visibility.

● Text size

You first need to write down all messages you will put on a photo, if it’s short then you can easily go with the big text, the problem is when you have a lot of information, your text would become tiny. In this case, you can either cut off some unnecessary part to put it on one picture, or you can allocate them to multi photos if you consider every piece of your information is important.

● Position

Always place your text on the plain area of the picture to avoid invisibility. If you can not find the ideal area, considering co-use other tips to help your text survive.

● Darken the background

You may put a dark filter with some opacity on the photo if it’s so detailed in order to make the text more visible. This technique works best when you have lots of texts and information to put on. It’s the practice used by many social networks when you view the photo with caption in fullscreen.

● Blur the image

It’s a good idea to blur the image or some part of it a little bit when it is so detailed. This will help your text to not sink in the background, but this technique will drastically decrease your image quality.

● Put text in a box

Putting the text inside a frame can make it stand out if your photo has many colors, or there are differences between the dark and the light sections. Try to go for a shape that can work with your image and the choice of words, and go for the box color that offers enough contrast for your lettering to show.

It is obvious that a picture with texts has a higher emotional impact and is more communicative, but there are also some tangible technical benefits that can be measured in statistics and numbers, and they will pay off your effort in making this particular content.

● Increase engagement

A study shows that the engagement can go up around 50 percent when we add writing in a picture. When an attractive visual is also added, the audience's willingness to read can be increased by more than 90 percent.

● SEO boost

There is a series of SEO boosters hidden beneath every word. Anchor tags, and descriptions might be a natural spot to include the keywords and the article descriptions that one can crawl in the search engines.

● An excellent way to determine ROI

We can fully gauge the value of our content when we add text to the images.

● Better branding

This might be an additional opportunity for you to showcase your brand. A text with a photo can show who you are and what your brand values are. The majority of people in the business world are convinced that brand content is likely to be consumed by the audience if it contains engaging text with imagery.

The power of wrapping text around a photo has been proved for many years in creating more valuable and engaging content, and it only needs a basic visual understanding to properly fusion both magical materials.