Use the captioner to place text in the three real TikTok styles — the white or black rounded box, the stroke outline, and plain — rendered in TikTok Sans, the platform's actual font. Drag each caption where you want it and export the slide.
Adding text in Canva or Photoshop gets you text on a photo. It doesn't get you TikTok's text, and the difference is instantly visible to anyone who uses the app.
TikTok's text tool isn't infinite — it produces a small number of recognisable looks, and that's exactly why matching it is possible.
The box style is a solid rounded rectangle behind the text, usually white with black type, sometimes inverted. It's the workhorse for readable captions over busy photos. The stroke style is text with a contrasting outline around each character, which stays legible over anything without adding a block of colour. And plain is just clean type, used when the photo has room for it.
Get those three right and you've covered virtually every captioned slide on the platform.
You can nail the box and still look wrong if the letters are wrong. TikTok renders captions in TikTok Sans, a typeface with specific proportions and weight behaviour that people have seen thousands of times without ever thinking about it.
Substitute a lookalike and viewers can't tell you what's off — they just register 'made elsewhere'. It's the same instinct that makes a fake receipt look fake. The captioner renders in TikTok Sans directly, which is why exports read as native rather than as a good attempt.
Where the caption sits changes how the slide performs. Text too near the bottom collides with TikTok's own UI — the description, the username, the sound ticker — and gets partially covered. Too near the top and it fights the search bar area.
The safe zone is the middle band of the frame, and captions that anchor there survive on every device. Drag your text to place it exactly, rather than accepting whatever an app template decides, and you get to control the one thing viewers actually read.
Honest answer: if you're posting one casual slide from your phone and you're already in the app, just use the app. It's right there and it's free.
This matters when you're on a computer — when your photos are already edited on desktop, when you're batching a week of content, when you want the same captioned set to also go to Reels, or when you want to keep the slides as files you own. Then captioning on desktop stops being a preference and starts being the only sane path.
TikTok Sans. It's the typeface behind the captions you see on photo posts, and matching it is what makes burned-in text look native.
It's one of the three built-in styles — a solid rounded box behind the type. The captioner includes it, in white and black.
Yes — that's exactly what the captioner is for, since TikTok's own text tool is mobile-app only.
Keep them in the middle band of the frame. The bottom is occupied by the description, username and sound ticker on the live post.