YouTube

There are five different types of annotations to choose from:

• Speech bubble: for creating pop-up speech bubbles with text.
• Spotlight: for highlighting areas in a video; when the user moves the mouse over these areas the text you enter will appear.
• Note: for creating pop-up boxes containing text.
• Title: for creating a text overlay to title your video.
• Label: for creating a label to call out and name a specific part of your video.
• "Pause" annotations are no longer available. Moving forward, your old pause annotations will continue to work, but you will not be able to create new ones.

Once you've chosen which type of annotation you want to insert, use the settings underneath the "Add annotation" button to change the font size, color, or background color.

Position the annotation on the video by dragging and dropping it within the video player. Use the small white squares on the corners of the annotation to make them bigger or smaller. To control the position of the annotation with maximum precision, you may select it and adjust it one pixel at a time with your arrow keys, or ten pixels at a time if you hold down shift while pushing the arrow keys.

Determine when you want to the annotation to appear by using the "Start" and "End" settings on the right side. Or, you can move the annotations around on the timeline underneath the video.

Note: links to specific times may not be precise. The encodings we use for video streaming typically have keyframes every two seconds and it is only possible to seek the player to keyframes.

Check the "Link" box underneath the "Start" and "End" settings. You can choose whether you want the annotation to link to another video, your channel, etc.