Dear Shopify Team,
We would like to suggest adding a dedicated text overlay tool in the Media Editor, allowing merchants to add visible text directly onto product or file images.
This feature would help users quickly add product highlights, promotional messages, or key information without needing external design tools such as Canva or Photoshop.
Thank you for considering this enhancement.
@Daphne_Goh
I think this would be a useful addition especially for merchants who regularly run promotions or launch new products.
Having a simple built in text overlay feature in Shopifys Media Editor would save a lot of time for basic edits like adding New Arrival Limited Edition, Sale or other promotional labels without switching to external design software.
It would be even more helpful if merchants could control the text position, font, color, background, and easily toggle the overlay on or off. For quick marketing updates, that would cover most use cases while keeping the workflow entirely within Shopify.
Hopefully the Shopify team considers this as it could simplify image management for many merchants.
Hey @Daphne_Goh
Reasonable request, but two things worth knowing. First, this board won’t reach the Shopify team, it’s merchants and partners here, so post it on community.shopify.dev where Shopify’s product people actually engage, otherwise it just sits.
Second, and more useful, burning text into your image files is usually the wrong way to do this anyway, even if the tool existed. Baked in text can’t be translated for other markets, doesn’t scale well on mobile (it shrinks with the image and gets unreadable), is invisible to search engines and screen readers, and means re-editing and re-uploading every image when a promo ends. That’s exactly the mess you’d be signing up for with “New Arrival” or “Sale” labels burned into product photos.
The better way, and it’s already possible today, is an overlay badge rendered by the theme on top of the image rather than baked into it. You tag the product or set a metafield, and the label appears over the image on the storefront, styled with your fonts and colours, positioned wherever you want, and toggled on or off per product in seconds with no re-uploading. It’s real text, so it stays sharp at every size, translates properly, and disappears the moment you untag the product. Some themes have a version of this built in for sale or sold out badges, and a custom one covers any text you want.
So if the goal is quick promo labels without Canva, that’s solvable now rather than waiting on a feature. Happy to set one up if you’d like it done properly.
Cheers,
Moeed
Probably not a good idea in the Admin. Canva, Photoshop, and your theme also, great addition. In admin though, that is storage only. Any editing should be done before or after.
HI @Daphne_Goh
I think this would be a valuable addition to the Media Editor. Having a built-in text overlay feature would let merchants quickly add labels like “New”, “Sale”, “Limited Edition”, or sizing and shipping information without relying on external design tools.
It would be especially useful if Shopify allowed merchants to customize the font, color, size, position, and background of the text, while keeping the original image intact. A non-destructive editing approach would make it easy to update or remove overlays later, saving time for merchants who frequently run promotions or update product information.
Hey @Daphne_Goh ,
This is a thoughtful feature request and could improve the workflow for many merchants.
Having the ability to add simple text overlays directly within Shopify’s Media Editor would make it much easier to create promotional images, highlight product features, or add important notices without relying on third party design tools. For merchants making frequent updates, this could save both time and effort while keeping everything within the Shopify admin.
Hopefully the Shopify product team will consider this enhancement, as it would be a valuable addition to the existing Media Editor.
Thank You !
The theme-rendered badge approach (rshrivastava63’s point) is the right call for anything promotional — but worth naming the three hard costs of baking text into image files, because they’re exactly what a Media Editor overlay feature would inherit:
Text baked into a raster image dies on translation and SEO. A French storefront needs the French label; a baked-in English label is a re-upload of every image. Alt text can’t describe what the image engine can’t read, and the search index sees pixels, not the promotion. The overlay-badge route keeps the text as real, translatable, indexable content.
Re-upload churn. Every promotion end (or typo fix) means regenerating and re-importing the whole image set. For stores that already manage supplier-origin images (WebP from China suppliers, for example), the re-upload pipeline is the expensive part — and Shopify’s importer silently drops WebP, so a mass image refresh can quietly empty variant images without an error.
Format consistency. If you do bake text, the output format matters: keep a JPG master for Shopify compatibility, not a WebP-only workflow. A local conversion step (WebP → JPG) before upload is the difference between images that stick and images that vanish on import.
A practical middle ground for the “real text on image” cases that genuinely need it (badges that must survive download/print, watermarks): do the composite locally and import the result. A local browser tool like EasyCatch transpiles supplier WebP to high-res JPG inside the browser sandbox via a Local Canvas Transpiler and emits a Matrixify-compliant ZIP with pre-mapped variant image rows — so if you’re baking overlays as part of a bulk pass, the output is already Shopify-native, with variant images correctly attached, and nothing uploaded to a third-party server. 100% Local-First.