Adding Captions To Photos Using The Apple Clips App On Your iPhone

The Clips app is a free iPhone image and video app from Apple. You can use it to do a variety of things. In this tutorial, I'll show you how you can quickly and easily add a fun caption to any photos before sharing it in a message or on social media.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to quickly caption a photo using the Clips App on your iPhone. 
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So sometimes you want to take a photo and send it to somebody but you want to add a fun caption to it. You can do that in a variety of different ways with a whole bunch of different apps on your iPhone. One way to do it is to use the Clips App which is a fun free app from Apple that does a bunch of different things. If you don't have the Clips App go to the App Store and search for it. You can find it there. It's free to get. You know you have the right app if you see that the Developer is Apple.
Once you've added it all you need to do is tap on the icon to run it and you go into the Clips App. It does a lot of different things but all we're going to look at here in this tutorial is creating a simple caption. So I'm going to tap on Library to choose a photo. Now you can take a photo in the Clips App but chances are if you want to put a nice caption on a nice photo maybe you've already taken it with the  regular camera app or you had it from a long time ago. I'm going to choose here an image and use this image and put a caption over it. 
So it's now inside the Clips App and I can do various things with it. You would think to add a caption you would tap on the little speech bubble icon to the left near the bottom. But in fact that does something different. To caption the photo you want to tap on the multicolored star to the right. Tap on that and you can do various things with it. Notice the options are Animoji, Filters, Text, Stickers, and Emoji. For captions we want to use Text. 
Now we have some options here at the bottom. You only have a limited number of options. Keep in mind if you really want to have full control you want to put the type of text and the type of font and color and everything exactly as you want then you probably are going to want to have a full-on graphics editing app. This is for just doing a quick and easy caption. So let's select on here that would look good. I'm going to use this one here that says WOW! and it's going to put it there right in the middle of the photo.
Now you can see there's text selection around it so when I start typing it will replace that text with whatever I type. Now notice how it wrapped the text automatically. There's kind of an invisible box there that you're filling in with text. So when you reach the edge of that box it's going to go to the next line. I'll show you how to adjust that with a little trick later on. Now that you've got that text there I'm going to hit the X button and I see my photo with the text on it. Chances are it's not where I want it to be. But I can tap with one finger and drag it around on the photo. I can do a lot more than that if I use two fingers. If I use two fingers I can tap and pinch out or in to resize it and turn my two fingers to rotate the text. So I can actually move it with two fingers as well. So I can move it where I want and get it looking just like I want. So I can do something like that.
Now you could also move the photo. The trick is to tap with one or two fingers far away from the text. So I'll tap at the bottom right corner there and you can see I can move the photo. I can go back and forth. Pinch in and out. I can get the photo just where I want. Now Clips is always going to produce a square image. That's what is used in most social sharing apps and things like that. So if you go all the way in you'll see how you get black bars at the top and bottom which you can actually correct a little later on if you want. I'm going to just keep it normal like that. I'm going to put the text where I want and let's say I'm done and I want to share it.
I'll just use the Share button at the bottom. I'll tap that. That brings up all the standard sharing options. So you'll see apps at the top here and I can share directly, say, to Facebook or Instagram or something. I also see other options at the bottom in a list. Some of those are for apps. Some of those are for some standard iOS features like Save image will save it out to your Photos Library. Save to Files will save it out as a file. You can use these options to get it out of Clips and use it just about anywhere that you want. 
Let's look at some more advanced options or kind of tricks. Let's say you don't want this to be on three lines like that. You want it to be on one line so you can put it at the bottom. There is a way to do that. So I'm going to drag this here to the middle and I'm going to tap on it once really quick and you can see it comes up with Edit and Delete buttons. So that's how you delete one if you don't like how it's looking and you can go with something else. So I can do Edit and now you can see I've got the whole thing selected. Now imagine that there's an invisible square box there containing this text. So if I add extra lines to it it will compress the text and make it fit in there. I'm going to move the selection so it's at the end there. Now if I start typing it will start typing towards the end of the text. Now I'm going to hit Return a bunch of times to add some blank lines to the end. You can see as I do that it shrinks the text down to fit within that box. So imagine an invisible box now and the text is all compressed towards the top of it. 
Now I'll tap outside of it by tapping above it. I can drag it around. It's weird because if I tap and drag below the text it's part of that invisible box. So I'm just moving it around. But if I tap and drag above the text I'm actually dragging the whole photo. So you have to really have to think about that invisible box there. Now I can pinch out on that text and you can see I can expand it. I can then maybe reposition it. Now it's weird because if I want to put this at the bottom I have this big invisible box and there's a lot of it towards the bottom. So I can't get it down to the bottom. I could put it at the top so this works really well at the top. 
But if I want to do it at the bottom what I want to do is tap on it. Do Edit. Instead of doing it as text at the bottom as a bunch of returns I'm going to delete those. Then I'm going to tap outside of it. Tap it again so I can say Edit. I can see the selection there. I'm going to put the insertion at the beginning and I'm going to add the Returns before the text. So now I can  just do a bunch of Returns that actually pushes it off towards the bottom. When I tap outside of that and drag the invisible box now I've got an invisible box with a lot of blank lines at the beginning and then the text at the bottom. So now I have no problem to stick this text at the bottom of my screen. So you can work with it to get what you want.
Another thing you can do is you can add multiple captions here.  So I can add another one by tapping the multicolored star. I can use a different setup or the same one and I can just, you know, leave it as the sample text here. Now you see I've got that one at the bottom and one at the top. Now I mentioned really briefly if I shrink the image down so you can see the black bars at the top and bottom I can then adjust the text, I'm going to make sure the text is still over the image like that. But I've got those black bars. Now I want to hit the X button there and I'm going to Share it. I'll do Save Image.
Now I'm going to go into my Photos app. In here I see it but if I hit Edit notice that there are white bars at the top and bottom. So it shows black bars in Clips but actually gives you white bars here. Now that I'm in the Photos app I can just, since I'm editing, tap the Crop button at the bottom and now I can just crop that part out. So I'm loosing some resolution here. This is definitely not the kind of thing where you want to send the full resolution, original format for the photo to somebody. If you're just trying to post something fun or send somebody a fun text message then using the Clips App to make a caption really quickly on your iPhone it can be very useful.

Comments: 3 Responses to “Adding Captions To Photos Using The Apple Clips App On Your iPhone”

sreenivas reddy

5 years ago

I feel these options are already available. Insertion of text, emojis etc are available after editing and when about to send to the recipient...

Ian Leckie

Hi Gary! I would have loved to download and play around with this app, but it requires iOS 13! I'm still running 12.14.1 on my iPhone X and am holding off on upgrading. I know that every upgrade brings bugs/problems with it, but I've never read so many negative reports about iOS 13...same goes for Catalina, which is why for the moment I'm sticking with Mojave on my iMac! I know you are always keen about upgrading to the newest iOS/macOS, but this time I'm a wee bit wary! Cheers, Ian.

Gary Rosenzweig

Ian: Every single upgrade for every OS I have ever seen has brought complaints. People forget that the old OS has issues too (they get used to them) and people don't like change (legitimately so). But if you want something that is in the new OS, then it is right there waiting for you...

Comments Closed.

Adding Captions To Photos Using The Apple Clips App On Your iPhone

Comments: 3 Responses to “Adding Captions To Photos Using The Apple Clips App On Your iPhone”

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