Image macro

In internet culture, an image macro is a picture superimposed with text for humorous effect. If an image macro becomes recognizable enough, it can be considered an instance (sometimes the only instance) of an associated internet meme. Early image macros were commonly overlaid with white Impact font bordered with a thin black outline. The use of image macros of this format was widespread from 2007 to 2011. The format popularized in internet culture from 2015 to present is a white area above the image (or sometimes even a video) containing a caption, originating with screenshots from the Twitter mobile application. Today, there is a wide assortment of visual styles accepted as image macros that are shared widely in a variety of social media platforms including Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, and more.

The term "image macro" originated on the Something Awful forums. The name derived from the fact that the "macros" were a short bit of text a user could enter that the forum software would automatically parse and expand into the code for a pre-defined image. This in turn related to the computer science topic of a macro, defined as "a rule or pattern that specifies how a certain input sequence (often a sequence of characters) should be mapped to an output sequence (also often a sequence of characters) according to a defined procedure".

Beginning in 2007, lolcats and similar image macros (a form of internet phenomenon) spread beyond the initial communities who created them and became widely popular.

Although they come in many forms, the most common type of image macro consists of:

One of the more famous image macros is "O RLY?" O RLY is often used on the internet as an abbreviation for the phrase "Oh, really?" Originally started with a snowy owl photograph (which is the classic O RLY image macro), it spread out over the Web quickly and was followed by other macros that convey a wide range of emotions. Another style of image macro that has amassed its own separate subculture is the "lolcat", an image combining a photograph of a cat with text intended to contribute humour. The text is often idiosyncratic and grammatically incorrect, and its use in this way is known as "lolspeak" or "kitty pidgin". Many times, the image is told from the point of view of the animal.

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