How to Add Subtitles in iMovie (2026): iPhone, iPad & Mac Workflow

iMovie is Apple's free editor on Mac, iPhone, and iPad — friendly for individual creators, students, and family video projects. It has one specific limitation that matters for anyone with more than a minute of footage: iMovie has no built-in speech-to-text or auto-caption feature. Every subtitle has to be typed in manually, one line at a time, using iMovie's Title overlay tool.

For a 30-second clip, manual typing is fine. For anything longer — especially non-English content, mixed-language footage, or any video where you'd want a real caption track — the manual workflow gets unreasonable fast.

This guide covers what iMovie's subtitle feature actually does on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, the manual method step-by-step, and a faster workflow using Subanana to auto-generate an SRT file that you burn in via an SRT-capable editor.

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What iMovie's subtitle feature can and can't do

iMovie's "subtitle" feature is not a dedicated caption track. It's the Titles tool — text overlays that sit on top of the video. The behaviour is consistent across the iPhone, iPad, and Mac versions:

The two consequences worth highlighting before you start:

1. There's no SRT import path. Even if you already have a caption file from another tool, iMovie can't load it. You'd need a Subanana → SRT-capable editor → MP4 → re-import to iMovie workflow, or just skip iMovie entirely for the captioning step.
2. Every subtitle is a separate Title object. A 5-minute video with 60 captions = 60 Title overlays to position, time, and style by hand.

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Method 1: Manual subtitles on iMovie for iPhone or iPad

Use this when you have a short clip (under ~30 seconds) and only need a handful of captions.

1. Open iMovie, create a new project, choose Movie
2. Import or record the footage, drop it into the timeline
3. Tap the clip → tap the T (Title) button → choose a title style (e.g. "Lower", "Standard")
4. Double-tap the sample text on the preview and type your caption
5. Drag the Title's edges in the timeline to set when it appears and disappears
6. Repeat for every caption

Tip: styles like "Lower" position the text at the bottom of the screen, which reads more like a real caption than the centred "Standard" style.

Where this stops working: anything over a minute, anything with more than ~10 captions, or any content where you'd want to time-align captions precisely to speech.

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Method 2: Manual subtitles on iMovie for Mac

The workflow is the same as iPhone / iPad but with the desktop interface:

1. Open iMovie, create a new project
2. Import the footage to the timeline
3. From the Titles panel, pick a style and drag it onto the subtitle track above your clip
4. Double-click the placeholder text and type your caption
5. Drag the title's edges in the timeline to set the in/out timing

iMovie Mac also doesn't accept SRT imports, so even if you have a caption file from another tool there's no direct path to use it. That's where method 3 comes in.

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Method 3 (recommended for longer or multilingual content): auto-generate with Subanana, burn in with an SRT-capable editor

iMovie's lack of auto-caption and SRT import means the realistic workflow for any longer or multilingual video is to generate captions outside iMovie and burn them in elsewhere:

1. Upload to Subanana. Drop your video into Subanana or paste a YouTube / Instagram / Facebook URL — Subanana fetches and transcribes without a separate download.
2. Review and edit captions. Subanana auto-generates time-aligned captions; the editor highlights likely mistranscriptions for one-click correction.
3. Export SRT. From the editor, export the caption file as SRT.
4. Burn the captions into your video. Use any SRT-capable editor: Final Cut Pro (zh-HK), DaVinci Resolve (zh-HK), Premiere Pro (zh-HK), or even a free option like HandBrake (with SRT track) — import the SRT, position it on the timeline, export the MP4 with burned-in subtitles.
5. (Optional) Use the burned-in MP4 as iMovie's input. If your downstream workflow specifically needs iMovie for editing, you can import the captioned MP4 as the source clip — the captions are baked into the video frames at that point.

This is more steps than "type into iMovie," but for anything over a minute it's faster — Subanana's auto-caption + edit step is typically a few minutes for content where manual typing would take an hour.

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Subanana for multilingual or non-English iMovie projects

If your video is in a language iMovie can't help with at all (because iMovie has no STT regardless of language), Subanana's specific shape is:

• Multilingual transcription with per-language STT model routing — every supported language (80+) is benchmarked and routed to its best-evaluated model, including Cantonese, Mandarin, and English; the underlying STT layer routes each transcription to the best-evaluated model per source language rather than locking to one vendor.
• Mixed-language ("code-switching") content — handles the common Cantonese / Mandarin + English-loanword pattern that English-first tools mishandle.
• Burned-in video export — if you don't want the SRT-then-editor round trip, Subanana can export an MP4 with captions already burned in, single-language or bilingual (source + translation stacked per cue), skipping the iMovie / SRT-editor step entirely.

→ Product: Subanana — multilingual transcription & live captioning

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Frequently asked questions

Does iMovie have automatic captions?

No. As of 2026, neither iMovie for Mac nor iMovie for iPhone / iPad has built-in speech-to-text or auto-caption generation. The closest equivalent is iOS's system-level "Live Captions" feature, but that's an accessibility overlay for the device — it doesn't produce a caption file you can save with your iMovie project.

Can I import an SRT file into iMovie?

No. iMovie doesn't accept SRT or other external caption formats. The only way to get captions into an iMovie project is to type them as Title overlays manually, or to burn them into the video before importing it into iMovie.

What's the fastest way to subtitle a 10-minute video for iMovie?

Generate the SRT outside iMovie (using a transcription tool like Subanana), burn the captions into the video file using an SRT-capable editor, then either use that captioned video as your iMovie input or skip iMovie's editing step entirely. Manually typing 10 minutes of captions in iMovie typically takes longer than this round trip.

Does iMovie work for Cantonese, Mandarin, or other non-English captions?

iMovie's Title tool accepts any Unicode text, so typing captions in any language works fine. The bottleneck is generating those captions in the first place — iMovie has no auto-transcription regardless of language, so for non-English content the manual workflow is the same speed as English but with the added typing burden.

Can I export the iMovie project with burned-in subtitles?

Yes. iMovie's standard export produces an MP4 with all Title overlays baked into the video frames. Whether those overlays came from manual typing or from a captioned source clip, they're burned in by the time you export.

Is there a free alternative to iMovie that supports SRT import?

Yes — DaVinci Resolve (free version) and HandBrake (free) both accept SRT files for subtitle workflows. If subtitle support is the main reason you'd switch off iMovie, DaVinci Resolve is the closest Mac-friendly alternative.

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Related guides

• How to add subtitles in Final Cut Pro (zh-HK)
• How to add subtitles in DaVinci Resolve (zh-HK)
• How to add subtitles in Premiere Pro (zh-HK)