Add Subtitles to Instagram Reels

One Reel, three framings

A Reel isn't only watched full screen. The same clip turns up in at least three places, and each shows a different slice of it.

Reels tab

Full-screen vertical playback with Instagram's controls on top. The whole 9:16 frame is visible, but the bottom and right edges are covered.

Main feed

Reels appear among posts from accounts people follow. Depending on the app version and the viewer's phone, the frame may show in full or be trimmed at the top and bottom.

Profile grid

A cropped tile taken from the cover frame. The grid has changed shape over the years, from square to a taller rectangle, and only the central part of a 9:16 cover survives either way.

Text near the vertical centre lives through all three. Text close to the top or bottom is the first thing lost, either under buttons or off the edge of a crop. That is why Social Media, the preset this page starts with, sits just under the middle rather than at the foot of the frame.

What covers a Reel in the viewer

On the Reels tab, Instagram stacks controls along the right edge: like, comment, share or send, a menu, and the audio thumbnail. Across the bottom you'll see the account name with a follow button, the post's caption text and the audio track name. Tap the caption text and it expands upward over the video, sometimes by several lines. Instagram moves these elements now and then, and phones with different screen ratios place them differently, so no pixel map stays accurate for long.

Two conclusions follow. Keep captions out of the lower part of the frame, because your own post text may expand over them. And keep them narrow enough that the right end of a long line doesn't slip under the button column.

Instagram's captions or yours

Instagram has its own options, and it helps to know how they differ from burned-in text before you decide.

• Auto-generated captions: Instagram can create captions from the speech that viewers turn on or off themselves. They are styled and positioned by Instagram, and availability depends on the language and the account's settings.
• The captions sticker: in the Reels and Stories editors, a sticker can transcribe the audio into on-screen text with a few style choices, where the feature is offered. You can edit the words and move the sticker inside the app.
• Burned-in subtitles from this editor: part of the video file, styled as you choose, and identical wherever the Reel plays or gets downloaded and reshared. They can't be turned off, and changing a word after posting means rendering and posting again.

None of these is best for every Reel. If you burn subtitles in, leave Instagram's auto captions off so the two don't overlap. If you cross-post to Facebook, the burned version carries over unchanged; captioning Facebook Reels covers that platform's differences.

Subtitling a Reel in the editor

1. Open the editor on this page and select your vertical clip: MP4, MOV, M4V, WebM or MKV. Under Style, Social Media is already chosen.
2. Get the lines: leave "Write the subtitles automatically with AI" on, or switch it off and use Import SRT / VTT, or press Enter to type a line where the playhead is.
3. Play the Reel through and correct anything misheard, especially product names, prices and people's names.
4. Turn on "Show safe area" and check the busiest moments. If a line covers a face, use "Nudge up / down" to shift the whole block.
5. Scrub to the frame you plan to use as the cover and make sure any caption visible there sits near the middle.
6. Click Render video, start it from the summary, keep the tab open until it finishes, then click Download video.

Instagram can be used from a desktop browser, including for posting, so you can upload the MP4 straight away or send it to your phone first.

Choosing a look for Reels

Three presets suit most Reels, and you can adjust any of them.

Social Media

Poppins in an extra-bold weight, dark text on a near-white rounded box, just under the centre. The box guarantees contrast on busy, colourful footage.

Creator

Montserrat at its heaviest weight, yellow uppercase with a thick black outline, slightly lower than Social Media. Loud, suits commentary and reactions over plain backgrounds.

Modern

Poppins on a translucent dark rounded box. Calmer, works for brands that want a quieter on-screen voice; it starts at the bottom, so move it to Middle for Reels.

Size is measured against the frame's shorter side, its width on a vertical clip, so it holds steady whether you shot 720 or 1080 wide. Two stacked lines are about the limit before captions start eating the picture; the editor flags anything over three. For more on fonts and colour, see subtitle styles.

No preset animates. Lines appear and disappear whole, with no word-by-word highlighting; the TikTok caption style page explains what static captions can and can't imitate.

Shape, cover and grid

The editor keeps your clip's resolution and orientation and never crops or pads it. If your footage is 16:9, reframe it to 9:16 in a video editor before captioning, or Instagram will show it small with bars around it. Shooting vertically from the start avoids the problem entirely.

When you post, Instagram lets you pick a cover frame and adjust how it sits in the profile grid. If that frame contains a caption, the middle-placed text is what stays in the tile; text near the edges would be cut off. Some creators choose a cover frame between captions, or upload a separate cover image, to keep the grid clean.

Examples

If you just need a subtitle file from the speech rather than a rendered Reel, the subtitle generator produces SRT or VTT. Square and 4:5 posts behave differently from Reels; subtitles for Instagram feed videos deals with those shapes.

About the subtitle editor on this page

Opens

MP4, MOV, M4V, WebM, MKV videos your browser can decode

Subtitles from

AI (from the speech, optionally translated into one of 21 languages), an SRT or VTT file, or typing them in

You download

An MP4 with the subtitles drawn into the picture at the original resolution and frame rate, plus SRT and VTT files

Cost

Editing, styling, rendering and SRT/VTT export are free, with no account and no watermark. AI subtitles cost 1 credit per minute (5-credit minimum per video); signing in with Google gives 100 free credits and accounts get 10 free credits a day

Privacy

The video never leaves your device and is rendered in your browser. Only for AI subtitles is the audio sent, over HTTPS, and it is deleted within 30 minutes of delivery

Rendering needs

Chrome or Edge 94+, Safari 16.4+, or Firefox 130+ on a computer. Editing and SRT/VTT export work in any current browser