If you want to record what is happening on your screen, then you can use dozens of screen recording software that capture screen activity into video files. But video files are huge and not easy to share. If you have more than 10 minutes of screen activity to be recorded then video files are justified but it is crazy to create large videos for the duration of a few seconds only. If you want to record your screen activity for only a few seconds or minutes, then it is better to capture it into a GIF animation which is smaller in size and can be viewed inside any web browser. Being a type of image, the GIF animation can also be shared very easily on social networks.
You can use the free software Screen to Gif to capture your screen activity into a GIF animation file. The program is open source and is available as a portable application. When you run it, an empty window is displayed. You can drag this empty window to any region on your screen that you want to record. You can also resize the window to any size you want in order to cover a larger or smaller area on your screen.
Before you start recording, it is good idea to go through the Screen to Gif settings. You can open its settings by clicking on the gear-like icon. In the settings, you can choose to show the cursor (in the animation), edit frames after recording, save to desktop, use modern style app etc. You can also customize the hotkeys for starting and stopping the video capture.
You can also change the GIF settings by clicking on the picture-like icon next to the gear-like settings icon. Here you can choose which type of encoding you want – custom GIF encoding or paint.NET encoding. The compression level can also be selected from a slider control. If you want to loop the animation then you can choose whether to loop it forever or only a number of times.
Once you have selected the settings to your satisfaction, you can start recording your screen. You can press the F7 key to start recording the screen and once you have done all the recording, you can press the F8 key to stop the recording. Depending on the settings, you may be prompted to edit the frames before it saved the animation to your hard disk.
Conclusion: The Screen to Gif program can help you record the screen activity into small GIF animation image files. It can be customized to record any region on your screen using a custom frame rate and GIF encoding. The only obvious drawback with Screen to Gif is that you cannot record sound with GIF recording.
You can download Screen to Gif from http://screentogif.codeplex.com/.