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I have a blog, and sometimes I'd like to show my readers something specific about computers.

I've seen a lot of screen recording software, but all seem to save as video files.

Do any save as an animated GIF? I know how to transform a small video into a .gif, but I believe that I could make a smaller file if the .gif was created directly.

I'd like to be able to make something like this (from Codinghorror's "Invisible Formatting Tags are Evil"):

alt text

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    for Linux/POSIX: unix.stackexchange.com/a/35404/14305 Nov 8, 2012 at 19:20
  • My 7 years old question is marked as duplicate of a 6 years old question :D
    – Manu
    Aug 25, 2016 at 20:32
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    @Manu If it's any consolation, I've just upvoted you for being first. Thanks to Janus for the Unix link. Nov 8, 2016 at 11:45

3 Answers 3

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Camtasia. If you scroll down, in the comments Jeff says:

Please, tell what tool you did use to make that kind of gif-based animated demo ?

In this case, it's Camtasia, but I've used gif-gif-gif before for similar effects. Check out the Donation Coder roundup of screencasting tools for more options:

http://www.donationcoder.com/Reviews/Archive/ScreenCasting/

Jeff Atwood on May 9, 2006 9:02 AM

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To capture screen shots I find Cropper is very good (and it is free). Animated GIF support is available in the Cropper Plugins.

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  • Works fine on Windows 7. Only downside is it won't record the mouse cursor. Oct 3, 2013 at 23:52
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    @ThatBrazilianGuy: you can activate mouse cursor capturing in options: j.mp/19t37BM Nov 16, 2013 at 15:52
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    Cropper doesn't have a very smooth user experience. The area selection window gets in the way during capture. If you hide that you have trouble starting and stopping capture. It crashes sometimes. Etc etc.
    – fret
    Jul 8, 2014 at 0:28
  • Same experience -- it captures it's own window for the first few seconds until you hide it (and at the end again until you unhide it). Aug 25, 2014 at 4:51
  • I ended up writing "Gifferly" for all my gif capture needs ;-)
    – fret
    Sep 9, 2014 at 6:59
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When I have done this in the past, I always would do it in a two stage process. The easiest way to do this is use an application that records the video you want to convert into a GIF and then the second part of the process is to convert the video into a GIF image.

There are good desktop/screen capture utils however I recommend either Capture Fox

Animake will convert an mpg video into a GIF file.

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  • Capture Fox ceased development (stuck at Firefox 6). Anyway, was it capable of recording the screen outside of Firefox? Mar 9, 2014 at 12:30

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