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Screencapture and animated gifs

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

screen shot 2014-10-22 at 11 16 23 am

  1. hit the button

image

  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. image
  2. get the embed code and use the iframe
![2014-10-22 11_35_09](https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/39191/4741874/9890757a-5a1a-11e4-9a71-3f64bd66b7ab.gif)

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.


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.
@gokulkrishh
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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

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

Awesome work!

@mhauken
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mhauken commented Oct 23, 2014

You also have LICEcap which is a great alternative..

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

@xdumaine
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+1 for LICEcap

@n1k0
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n1k0 commented Oct 25, 2014

Another vote for LICEcap

@so0k
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so0k commented May 1, 2015

LICEcap because it supports windows (sorry)

@jgomo3
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jgomo3 commented May 13, 2016

@gokulkrishh thank you for the info on Linux.

@apokusin
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apokusin commented Jun 7, 2016

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.

@Kilims
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Kilims commented Nov 3, 2016

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

@scotcha1
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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.

@juliandavidmr
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@nstohler
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@paulohenriquesg
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GIFBrewery is free now :)

@vmpartner
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@tuanphpvn
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Thanks.

Ubuntu 16.04 work too.

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

@viper25
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viper25 commented May 22, 2018

Use ShareX

@tamsanh
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tamsanh commented Jun 5, 2018

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

https://giphy.com/apps/giphycapture

@alechp
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alechp commented Jun 15, 2018

https://getkap.co/ is pretty phenomenal

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

@ArkaJU
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ArkaJU commented Aug 17, 2018

LICEcap is pretty cool. 💯

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

@cdmo
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cdmo commented Jan 6, 2020

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

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