How to Add Text to a Video on iPhone

The fastest way to add text to a video on iPhone is to type your title onto the clip, place it where the platform's UI won't cover it, set when it appears, and export with no watermark. Here's how to do it with a real editor, and where to put the text so it actually stays visible.

Open the free Add Text tool →

Add text to a video on iPhone with iMovie

iMovie lets you type text onto a clip, choose a size, and position it with your finger. You can set an in point and an out point so the title appears for exactly the section it belongs to, instead of sitting on screen for the whole clip. The Photos app editor, by contrast, doesn't offer this at all. Its video tools cover trimming, cropping, rotating, flipping, and now speed and audio adjustments, but typing text onto the frame isn't part of what it does. For a title card, iMovie or a dedicated editor is the only native route.

Where to place text so the app UI doesn't cover it

Most vertical video gets watched inside a platform's own player, and that player has its own buttons, captions and usernames stacked along the bottom and top corner of the frame. Text placed near those edges gets hidden the moment the video is posted, even though it looked fine in the editor, on a full screen, with nothing overlaid on top of it yet. That gap between "looked right while editing" and "looks right once posted" is the actual failure mode here, and it's invisible until the clip is live somewhere. Keeping text in the center third of the 9:16 frame is the difference between a title people actually read and one that disappears behind an interface the moment it leaves the editor.

The safest way to check placement before posting is to view the draft inside the actual app you're posting to, in its normal player view, rather than trusting how it looked in the editor. The editor never shows the buttons and overlays that appear once a video is actually live.

Moving text on a real timeline

Montaj treats text as its own layer on a real timeline, not a sticker glued to the whole clip. That means you can animate it, move it, and time it precisely against the footage. One title fading in on a cut, another appearing only where it's relevant. Export runs at 1080x1920, with no watermark, so once you've added text to a video on iPhone this way, it's ready to post as-is.