Making a short animated GIF for docs or a chat

A few seconds of animation shows a click-through or a bug better than a paragraph, and a GIF plays everywhere: in a README, a help page, a ticket or a chat, with no player. These tools make one from your screen or a video, in your browser, with nothing uploaded.

1. Get the moving picture

• From your screen: in the Screen Recorder, choose Start recording and share just the window or tab, so the GIF isn’t mostly empty desktop. Go through the steps slowly, then Stop. Close anything private first.
• From a video you have: if you want only part of it, cut it down in the Video Trimmer first, or take the times straight from it in step 2.

2. Turn it into a GIF

Two routes, depending on where it came from:

• Straight after recording, the Screen Recorder’s As a GIF makes a GIF of the whole recording at the frames a second and width you choose.
• For part of a video, open it in the Frame Grabber, set From and To in seconds, the Frames a second and the Width, and choose Save as GIF.

Size is what goes wrong with GIFs, and three settings decide it:

• Length: keep it to a few seconds. A GIF stores its frames far less efficiently than a video does, so every second costs.
• Width: 600 to 800 pixels is plenty for a screen in docs or a chat; a phone screen needs less.
• Frames a second: 10 to 15 looks smooth for screen recordings, where most of the picture stands still.

Both stop at 600 frames, and each frame has at most 256 colours, so screens and drawings stay crisp but photos and gradients turn grainy.

3. Fix the timing and the frames

Open the GIF in the Animated GIF Maker to change it without starting again: it adds every frame with its delay. Remove frames you don’t want with the cross, move them with the arrows, and type a longer delay on the frame the viewer needs to read, such as the result after a click, so it pauses there. Set Loop to play forever or a set number of times, and Download the result.

To use one frame on its own, as a still image for a page or a ticket, open the GIF in the GIF Frame Extractor: each frame has a PNG link, and Download all as ZIP saves them all.

4. Or post a short video instead

When the GIF is still several megabytes, or the clip is longer than a few seconds or full of colour, a short MP4 is usually a fraction of the size and looks better. Most chat apps, GitHub and help desks play MP4 inline. Save the recording or the trimmed clip as a video, and if an MP4 or MOV is over the upload limit, the Video Compressor makes it fit the size you choose. Use a GIF where video doesn’t play, such as some wikis, email and older help tools.