How to Make GIFs From Everything on Windows, Including Apps and Games
Gif. Jeef. Whatever your preference for pronunciation, this word is easy to create using a variety of applications and services. Ever since I started at Lifehacker, I have found that it is sometimes easier to show, rather than tell, in a small animated image showing some key features or settings. Hence, I started making a lot of GIFs and here is the application I use to do this on Windows.
ScreenToGif is great for creating GIFs.
Can’t remember where I came across ScreenToGif , but I love this app. When you first open it, you are presented with a simple menu that showcases four key features of the app: recording your screen and converting it to GIF, converting the silly faces you make on your webcam to GIF, launching the digital whiteboard, and turning your doodles into GIF, as well as a general editor that you can use to take existing files (like MP4 videos) and turn them into GIFs.
To record the screen, click on the big red Recorder icon and a fun little window will appear – a kind of picture frame that you resize around the area you want to capture. Set the desired number of frames per second and press F7 to start recording and F8 to stop.
As soon as you stop recording, ScreenToGif launches its editor and automatically loads whatever you just captured. The GIF editor is similar to the lightweight video editor, in that both GIF and video create the appearance of motion in similar (but identical) ways .
You can preview your potential GIF frame by frame and crop or remove what you don’t need in the final product. You can also add or decrease the amount of time between frames (to speed up or speed up your GIF), move frames, add transitions and slides, and add witty text captions or other overlays to your GIF.
When you’re ready to create your GIF (File >> Save As), you can encode it using a variety of options (including FFMPEG and Gifski ). Each will give you a different mix of quality and file size, so be sure to try a few to find out which works best for your GIF creation needs. Here are a few that I created using encoders 1.0, 2.0, and Gifski respectively:
Do you have a Windows app (paid or free) that you really like? Tell us about it: [email protected] .