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Add text to your Instagrams with TitleFX

With this universal iOS app, you can choose from a variety of fun fonts and effects to add to photos before sharing on Instagram, Facebook, and elsewhere.

Matt Elliott Senior Editor
Matt Elliott is a senior editor at CNET with a focus on laptops and streaming services. Matt has more than 20 years of experience testing and reviewing laptops. He has worked for CNET in New York and San Francisco and now lives in New Hampshire. When he's not writing about laptops, Matt likes to play and watch sports. He loves to play tennis and hates the number of streaming services he has to subscribe to in order to watch the various sports he wants to watch.
Expertise Laptops, desktops, all-in-one PCs, streaming devices, streaming platforms
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Matt Elliott
2 min read

TitleFX is similar to another universal iOS app that I covered last month called Over HD. Both apps cost $1.99 at the moment and let you add cool-looking titles to your photos before sharing on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere. The apps are similar to one another, but if there can be only one, I'd go with TitleFX.

For starters, it's easier to use than Over HD and its menu wheel. For another,TitleFX also lets you angle text so that it's on an angle or vertical instead of always horizontal. On the other hand, TitleFX lacks Over HD's cropping feature, which Instagram users will bemoan.

Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET

To get started, tap the Photo Library or the Camera button from TitleFX's home screen to load a photo. You can also paste in a photo from your clipboard, while tapping on the Recent button will show you the last 20 photos you added text to.

After loading a photo, double tap the default text telling you to "double tap to edit." Enter your text and choose how to align it. Don't worry too much about your alignment choice here; you can drag the text around on the photo after this step to reposition it.

Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET
Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET

With your text entered, you then will use the five buttons at the bottom of the screen to punch it up. At the top are undo and redo buttons to aid the editing process. From left to right, the five buttons along the bottom are: font, size and angle, color, effects, background. There are are 29 font choices by my count, the majority of which are really cool. After settling on a font, the next button displays two sliders to adjust the size and angle of your title; you can't simply pinch to resize the title on the photo. After choosing the font color, any effects, and a background for your title area or declining any of these options, tap the share button in the upper-right corner to save your photo or share it via these methods:

Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET

For Instagrammers reading this, TitleFx doesn't offer any cropping to turn a rectangular shot into a square. The app opens your titled photo in Instagram, providing the necessary white bars around the rectangle to maintain its shape. Over HD, to its credit, lets you crop a photo if you'd like all of your Instagrams to be square.

One other note on the sharing options: the Postcard option comes courtesy of Sincerely.