Captions for Instagram Reels (Free, In-Browser)

Drop your video or audio file here

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Supports video and audio files up to 2048MB

About Captions for Instagram Reels

The styling defaults respect the Reels safe zones: the top 250 pixels are taken by the camera, profile, and audio metadata; the bottom 350 pixels by the caption bar, like and comment column, and share buttons. The preset positions caption text in the middle band that nothing else covers. Font weight and the pill background also default to what reads on a phone in vertical video, not what looked correct in a desktop preview at 100 percent zoom.

Meta does not see your Reel while you do this. The transcription and the burn-in both run inside this browser tab. The first time the page loads it pulls down the Whisper model and the FFmpeg WASM binary (roughly 80 MB combined), and that is the last network request your media is involved in.

When this fits

Batch content production

When you create five Reels in a session and queue them in a scheduler, burning captions in advance is faster than re-entering the Instagram editor for each one.

Cross-posting from TikTok

A TikTok with built-in captions loses them on export to Reels. Running the captioning here once produces a file that posts cleanly to both platforms.

Reels Ads

Paid Reels content rendered through Ads Manager often strips opt-in captions. Burned-in captions survive the ad delivery pipeline because they are pixels, not metadata.

Carousel and longer Reels

Reels up to 90 seconds make captioning more useful, not less. The inline transcript editor handles longer content without the timing drift that affects in-app captioning.

How to add captions to an Instagram Reel

1 Drop your Reel

Upload your 9:16 video file. The bytes go into browser memory; no Meta request is made.

2 Transcribe and review

Wait for Whisper to finish, then scan the transcript for words to fix. The cursor jumps to the matching video frame as you edit.

3 Pick the Reels styling preset

The default style is already tuned for Reels safe zones. Adjust font weight or position only if your specific Reel needs it.

4 Export the captioned MP4

Click Burn in. The output is an MP4 ready to upload to Instagram with captions visible on every frame they appear in.

Frequently asked questions

How is this different from Instagram's built-in caption sticker?

Instagram's built-in caption sticker only works on content you create inside the Instagram app. If you edit in CapCut, Final Cut, or any third-party tool, you cannot use the sticker. This page bakes captions into the file before upload, which works regardless of which editor produced the source video.

Does Meta see the Reel while you transcribe?

No. The transcription runs locally in this browser tab against a Whisper model that downloaded once on first use. No network request involves your video file. You can confirm with DevTools by opening the Network panel and filtering for fetch requests during a run.

What does the Reels safe zone preset actually do?

It sets the vertical caption position to roughly 0.78 (78 percent down the frame), which lands above the bottom 350 pixel band that Instagram covers with its own UI. The default font size and pill background are also picked for readability on a 6-inch phone screen.

Can I export captions as a separate file for Reels?

Reels does not accept SRT or VTT uploads from outside the app, so a separate caption file is not useful for this platform specifically. The burn-in path is the only path that survives the upload. The SRT and VTT exports are still available if you want them for archive or for other platforms.

Will the captions break Instagram's native auto-caption?

Instagram only generates auto-captions on videos that do not already have visible captions in the frame. When you upload a Reel with burned-in captions, Instagram skips its auto-caption pass, which is what you want.

Your video never leaves your device

All processing happens locally in your browser, and your files never leave your device. The page reads your video through a standard browser file input, holds the bytes in memory, runs Whisper for speech recognition in a Web Worker, and writes the captioned MP4 back to your disk. No upload, no cloud transcription queue, no external copy.

Captions for Instagram Reels