Screencapture and animated gifs

how to screencapture and make animated gifs or whathaveyou.md

Screencapture and animated gifs

I say "animated gif" but in reality I think it's irresponsible to be serving "real" GIF files to people now. You should be serving gfy's, gifv's, webm, mp4s, whatever. They're a fraction of the filesize making it easier for you to deliver high fidelity, full color animation very quickly, especially on bad mobile connections. (But I suppose if you're just doing this for small audiences (like bug reporting), then LICEcap is a good solution).

Capturing (Easy)

1. Launch quicktime player
2. do Screen recording

1. hit the button

1. you can chose to record entire screen or a portion by dragging:
2. do that then record and hit the stop button in the top taskbar.

• You can then Trim the video in quicktime with cmd-t.

1. File > "Save…". Save that shit.

Capturing (Pro)

1. Use Screenflow. It can do 60fps and do all sorts of annotations beyond the basic clicks that Quicktime will capture.

Making an animated gif (easy)

1. Go to gfycat and drag your mov file onto it.
2. get the embed code and use the iframe


Really, use the iframe. It'll give you better perf and will load way faster for your users.

If you really want a GIF file (terrible), then click the "GIF" icon. It's sweet to let them do the work for us.

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However if you want to make the gif on your own.. continue.

Making an animated gif (cheater)

Use an app called GIFBrewery but it costs money and is a little weird to configure. But it works. Run it through imageoptim after.

Making an animated gif (pro)

(This path is for people comfortable with homebrew and dotfiles.)

1. Grab gifify from @SlexAxton's gist: https://gist.github.com/SlexAxton/4989674 and toss it into your dotfiles somewhre
2. Make sure you have the dependencies: brew install ffmpeg gifsicle imagemagick
3. Run it with gifify yourvideo.mov --good
4. Run the image through imageoptim after.

How about http://recordit.co/?
It has a nice interface, just select an area and record.
The Framerate is low on the free account, but it works.

Hey paul, Just thought it would be great if you add the same for ubuntu. Below is the instruction.

For Ubuntu

Type the following command in ubuntu terminal

1. sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:fossfreedom/byzanz
2. sudo apt-get update
3. sudo apt-get install -y byzanz

Record the screen and save the file as gif

byzanz-record --duration=15 --x=400 --y=400 --width=800 --height=600 filename.gif

To record a full screen, just type

byzanz-record --duration=30 filename.gif

for more option

byzanz-record --help

I've added the gifify function to my bash-it fork: nwinkler/bash-it@e4bdad6

Awesome work!

You also have LICEcap which is a great alternative..

I use GifGrabber, great tool and lightweight (Mac OSX)

+1 for LICEcap

Another vote for LICEcap

LICEcap because it supports windows (sorry)

@gokulkrishh thank you for the info on Linux.

Droplr let's you record your screen and immediately uploads the GIF to a short URL. I use it for all my screenshots and caps.

Can you provide a version that I can use directly on windows?(green edition)Thanks deeply if you can.I love this tool

This is really cool, nice work. It's probably a few too many steps to really get used to though. CloudApp has a desktop app for both Mac and Windows, supports native screenshot annotation, GIF creation, HD video with sound, drag and drop file support, and uploads it all to a short URL to share. Cuts all those steps down to capture + share.

I use x11 rec

https://github.com/linuxenko/x11-recorder

• Windows: http://www.screentogif.com/
• compress with https://compressor.io/compress

GIFBrewery is free now :)

+1 http://recordit.co

Thanks.

Ubuntu 16.04 work too.

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg gifsicle imagemagick
gifify yourvideo.mp4 --good

Use ShareX

giphy has a great piece of software on MacOS for capturing gifs:

https://giphy.com/apps/giphycapture

https://getkap.co/ is pretty phenomenal

(repo: https://github.com/wulkano/kap)

LICEcap is pretty cool. 💯

+1 for http://recordit.co ; it's quick, simple, free

Super (lazy) pro: one-line idempotent (get docker first of course)

docker run -it --rm -v $(pwd):/data maxogden/gifify source.mov -o output.gif

https://github.com/maxogden/gifify-docker#installation

You can easily screencapture and create animated GIFs using software like ScreenToGif or ShareX. These tools let you record your screen, trim clips, and export them as GIFs. Just make sure you’re using the latest version of the software to get all the newest features and bug fixes.

Nice write-up! ScreenToGif has been my go-to tool for simple GIF creation, while ShareX offers plenty of customization options. It's also a good idea to keep an eye on the latest updates since they usually improve compatibility, fix bugs, and add useful features over time.

This is a helpful walkthrough, especially for anyone getting started with screen recording. Some newer tools simplify the entire process by combining capture, editing, and sharing into a single application. Before using software, I usually check the installation guide and the latest version to make sure I'm using the most stable release with the newest fixes and improvements.