Screen To GIF
Thursday, October 12th 2023
From time to time you find tools that make your life easier. But often we don't share or give credit to those tools. Today, I thought I would share a tool I've been using over the last year or so. This tool allows you to record your screen and produce GIFs. I've found a number of great uses for this tool. My first encounter was while doing troubleshooting for a software bug. While working as a manager of a software development team a support technician reported an issue with our software. Our developers could not reproduce the problem. The classic "it works on my machine" type scenario. Unfortunately we didn't have time setup a meeting for the technical support staff to demonstrate the bug. I got thinking, a picture is a thousand words. But a video much more. So I went looking for a simple way for them to record their screen. That's when I came across Screen To GIF.
Screen To GIF is a Windows application that can be installed or ran as a portable app. It's very simple to use. Just launch the software and you're presented with a simple record button. Click record and another window will open that behaves similar to a view finder on a camera. Whatever's in the window will be captured in the final GIF. Once you're done recording you're presented with a video editor. You can crop and edit to your hearts content. Then export the video as a GIF.
In my use case it worked perfectly. They were able to capture the bug. I shared it with the team and we solved the problem. Even as well as they described the behavior, they left out important details. Having a video captured the missing details. One thing to note is that GIFs can get rather large the longer they go. If what you're capturing is longer than 30 seconds, I would suggest using a video capturing application. But we'll save that for another post. Till then happy clip'n.
https://www.screentogif.com/Categories: Tools