Add text to photos with Over
Use this free app to spruce up pictures with text, stickers and more
You’ve likely heard the phrase “A picture is worth a thousand words” many times. It’s absolutely true that you can convey a significant amount of emotion and storytelling within a single frame.
But that doesn’t mean we should discard text entirely. Often, some carefully considered text can transform a photograph into a greeting, message, poster, or meme that has far more impact than the image alone.
There are, unsurprisingly, many apps for iOS that enable you to add text to images, but Over (Free, Universal) is a firm favorite. This is because even the free version of the app affords you a great deal of control, providing a usable interface for adding, editing, and adjusting words and phrases. Over is also extensible.
A “Pro” toolkit In-App Purchase ($2.99) adds all kinds of useful features to the app, including image filters, cropping, drop shadows, blend brushes, and Google Image search. Over bundles a range of fonts and a small selection of stickers, but many more can be purchased as you go along.
Basics and beyond
In the walkthrough, we take you through the basics of using Over, adding some styled text to a single still image, and then at the end utilizing a few of the pro tools to further enhance our work.
However, at the top of this page, you’ll see a screen grab of another creation – a simple birthday card. This showcases the use of stickers, which aren’t mentioned in the walkthrough. Stickers are set pieces of artwork that can be overlaid on any image, much like text. They can be resized, rotated, recolored, and have drop shadows applied to them. In our example above, we’ve placed a sticker with a blurred drop shadow over an imported photo, which was itself heavily blurred, and then cropped, saturated, and finally “knocked back” a little by reducing exposure.
The two very different results (the other being the walkthrough) highlight how powerful Over is, and how it rewards those who are happy to be imaginative and try new things. Fortunately, you are at no point punished for experimenting. The editing screen has an undo/redo feature, and Over also offers a projects system.
Exit an edit at any point and you’ll see your work saved as a project at the top of Over’s entry screen. Tapping a project opens it for editing, but you can also tap the “…” menu for additional options. You can name (or rename) an existing project, delete it, or – importantly – duplicate it. So, if you’re fairly happy with something you’re working on but wonder if it would be possible to take it further, you can return to the entry screen and duplicate the project; you can then make wild changes to the copy, knowing that your original version remains safe at the point you left it.
Prior to starting work on the walkthrough, we’ll assume you’ve installed the app and given it permission to access your photos. Our guide takes you through the process on iPad, but all the tools are available on iPhone, and even the layout is very similar, with tools at the bottom and top in portrait, and at the left and right in landscape.