Gif Tool For Mac
Other tools for creating GIFs. If you have a little spare cash, we recommend grabbing PicGIF from the Mac App Store. This costs £4.99, and is an attractive and easy-to-use option for making. Romanysoft GifTools is designed for Mac users to convert animated images from GIF to APNG format. It generates APNG files with better quality and smaller file sizes, and meanwhile removes white pixels around the edges in the original GIFs. Animated GIF Tool is an application which helps MacOS and iOS developers handle animated GIF files. The tool reads GIF files and lets the user export a Property List file containing width, height, frame count, loop count, and each animation frames timing information.
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.).
Tom8 Answers
I personally use and recommend LICEcap.
Best Gif Animator For Mac
- 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).
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..
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
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
ᔕᖺᘎᕊGeneral
- 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)
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
Snippet Tool For Mac
Franck DernoncourtSince 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 DernoncourtI 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. It is easy-to-use, beautiful, has a global record hotkey, and they're responsive on their Github Issues. To sweeten the deal, their logo is sexy. Unfortunately, StackExchange doesn't support svg images, so check out their site.