GIF is a very old image format dating back to the late 80’s when the people at CompuServe first figured out an easy way to display a series of images and thus creating an illusion of animation. It became extremely popular in the 90s when almost every website used one or other such GIF animations. But now in the days of multi-gigabit internet connections, high definition videos and better alternatives of animations, GIF seems to have lost its place it once enjoyed. Nevertheless, GIF animations can still be found on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr.
If you want to record your screen activities into GIF animations then there is a free tool called Gifster available. Since it can record anything being displayed on the screen, you can record websites, videos or computer game plays into GIF animations.
After launching the Gifster application, you can change the folder where all the images or animations shall be saved. You can also choose to record the mouse cursor actions or the thumbnail. By default it selects the frame rate to be 5 FPS and the image scale size to be 2x, but you can of course modify these to suit your needs. You can also drag and resize the target frame that defines which part of the screen shall be captured by Gifster.
Clicking on the GIF button will start recording the screen activities into GIF animation files that you can later find the specified folder. You can also upload the finished GIF file to the internet through Gifster and then share the URL on social networks.
In addition to recording GIF animations, Gifster also offers the functionality of a basic screen capture program. If you click on the small camera icon displayed next to the big GIF button, then it captures the screen and saves it into a JPEG image in the destination folder.
Conclusion: Gifster is a lightweight application that produces GIF animations from your computer screen’s activities. You can use it to capture screen into JPEG images, record GIF animations, and upload them to the internet for easy sharing.
You can download Gifster from http://gifster.mentalstack.com/.