Create your own memes in Terminal

To create a “meme”, or just adding text to an image - you don't need an app or an online service. You can do it yourself, in Terminal, using ImageMagick. Here's a short snippet you can use.

Since the command is kind of long, you can save in some file, or make a bash function - or maybe a script.

# ImageMagick v6
$ convert in.jpg -gravity south -font Impact -pointsize 120 -fill white -stroke black -strokewidth 3 -annotate +0+0 'Add text here' out.jpg

# ImageMagick v7
$ magick in.jpg -gravity south -font Impact -pointsize 120 -fill white -stroke black -strokewidth 3 -annotate +0+0 'Add text here' out.jpg

Text position

For -gravity you can use your normal: north, south, center, southeast, etc.

Fonts

I used Impact in the example. It's usally installed. But, if you want to change the font - just use another one from the list of fonts. Most font names are formatted with a dash, like “DevaVu-Sans-Bold”, “NimbusSans-Bold”, etc.

If you try one and it returns an error - you can get the list of fonts (ie. the font names) using:

# ImageMagick v6
$ identify -list font

# ImageMagick v7
$ magick -list font

To get a more readable list, you can use:

$ identify -list font | grep 'Font'

Text stroke

The size of the text stroke depends a little on the font, and what you like. 1-3 are good values. I usually go with 2, and sometimes (depending on the font) I use 1 or 3.

3 is probably closest to what you get at an online meme generator.

Example

Here's an example adding text 2 times (top and bottom).

$ magick in.jpg \
  -gravity north -font Impact \
  -pointsize 120 -fill white  \
  -stroke black -strokewidth 3 \
  -annotate +0+0 'Text at top' \
  out1.jpg
$ magick out1.jpg \
  -gravity south -font Impact \
  -pointsize 120 -fill white \
  -stroke black -strokewidth 3 \
  -annotate +0+0 'Text at bottom' \
  out2.jpg

It's more fun to spend time in Terminal, than at some online meme generator page. Plus, if you dig deeper into ImageMagick - you can add a lot of other effects as well. This was just a simple example.

// Happy hacking… 👍

· Eric