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Active1 year, 3 months ago

I'm looking for a free program that allows me to record my screen and save the 'video' as an animated GIF.

This will be useful when making instructions / steps to do something.

Requirements:

free (preferably open-source)
make a GIF that lasts for about 10 seconds
runs on Snow Leopard - 10.6.8 (if possible, Win7 as well :)
saves file locally - not uploaded automatically to a website

Note: I'm not looking for a program that converts images into an animated GIF, but more of a 'on-the-spot' video maker and converter (i.e., I want the program to make the video and make it as a GIF - to upload to websites etc.).

Tom

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8 Answers

I personally use and recommend LICEcap.

Great interface: select a region of the screen and set the frame rate and destination for the gif.
No time limit on length of gif.
OS X and Windows (can use Wine for Linux).

LICEcap also allows some further gif customisation, including adding title frame with custom duration to the gif, setting a pause hotkey and repeat count (as opposed to the default infinite repeat).

Used for many of my answers across SE (example).

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grggrg

I was actually trying to solve this problem for myself today and found this nice little Github gist:

Uses Quicktime to save a video, ffmpeg to convert the video, and gifsicle to compress/clean the final gif.

It uses the command line, so it might not be great for your use case, but I suspect this could easily be put into an Automator workflow.

Installation:

Converting:

The output resolution can (and probably should) be varied along with the file names.

For people wanting to produce a shell script to do the above, I came up with this:

If you wanted to create an automator workflow for this, you would want to use the 'Run Shell Script' workflow item using the arguments as input. I had to modify it slightly as the resulting .app doesn't know where ffprobe, ffmpeg, or gifsicle are, so this solution is definitely not very portable and might require adjusting, but it's at least quick:

You can then save the workflow as an app or service that works on files so that using it is as simple as dragging and dropping movies into it or right clicking on a video file:

I have no idea why it's apparently sped up though..

vmrobvmrob

You can use Recordit:

free (but not open-source)
make a gif that lasts for about 10 seconds (up to 5 minutes for free)
'on-the-spot' video maker and converter
Needs at least Mac OS X 10.8, Windows 7

Franck DernoncourtFranck Dernoncourt

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Since I don't prefer any of the other solutions since they don't have the specific features I want, I made my own (currently command-line only) program specifically for quickly capturing .gifs and .webm files for the web.

Features

Follows the mouse or captures fullscreen
You can specify width and height of a recording area around your mouse
Outputs to (lots of png files) .gif and .webm

Note that this was made in a day, if you're not a developer, you probably won't be able to install/use it yet. I will be updating this program to make it more user friendly

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AzeirahAzeirah

General

Free & Source code available
Simple to use
Portable
9 MB small
No limitations such as time or file size limit

Features

Record your screen and save directly to a gif looped animation
Pause and continue to record
Move the window around to record what you want
You can add Text, Subtitles and Title Frames
Edit the frames, add filters, revert, make yoyo style, change frame delay, add - border, add progress bars
Export frames
Crop and Resize
You can work even while the program is recording
Remove frames that you don't want
Select a folder to save the file automatically or select one before enconding
Add the system cursor to your recording
Very small sized, portable and multilanguage executable
Start/Pause and stop your recording using your F keys
Multi language: Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian, Russian, Swedish, Greek, F rench, -Simplified Chinese, Italian, Vietnamese and Tamil.
GreenScreen unchanged pixels to save kilobytes
You can apply actions/filters to selected frames
Fullscreen Recording
Snapshot Mode
Drag and Drop to add frames in the editor

Caveats

This application lacks a OSX version (but maybe others find it useful)

nixdanixda

You can use Quickcast:

free and open-source
up to 10 seconds and under 300px height/width
as of now Mac only
can publish .gif on QuickCast website directly

Franck Dernoncourt

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Franck Dernoncourt

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Since this question got a lot of attention, I feel that I should share my favorite screen recording software which isn't free but fulfill all other requirements and has many other useful features: TechSmith Camtasia

Mac and Windows (FYI Camtasia for Windows vs. Camtasia for Mac)
saves file locally or directly uploaded to a website (FTP, YouTube, Google Drive, etc.)
no limit of video length or video resolution
work with multi-monitor (the video area can even span on several monitors)
save as GIF:

Demo:

lots of post-processing options:

For a more thorough description, see the list of all features.

Franck DernoncourtFranck Dernoncourt

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I recommend Kap, an open-source screen recorder built with 'web technology.' It seems it only supports macOS as of now, but you might be able to add Windows support by a simple PR, as it is using JS.

Kap supports exporting to a variety of file formats, trimming the video before export, optionally uploading videos to a variety of cloud services, and the touchbar

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