Screen To GIF


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/
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Categories: Tools