How To Take Animated Gif Screenshots in Windows (2 Options)

Cropper is a very handy free screen capture utility. It can be used to capture a part of the screen, and create an animated gif such as this one below:

You can download Cropper from the Codeplex site.

After installing Cropper, head over to the Cropper plugins site and download the AnimatedGifplugin.

Extract the contents of the AnimatedGif zip file into the Plugins folder in the Cropper installation directory.

Now creating a gif is a little tricky and it took me a little while to figure out the way. Here’s how you can do it:

1. Run Cropper.exe. Right click on the taskbar icon and choose Output as Animated Gif.
2. Right click on the icon again and choose Options.
3. In the Appearance tab, check After Capture in Visibility/Translucent Captures. 

4. Position and resize the Cropper form over the area that you want to capture. 

The animated gifs will be stored in the Cropper Captures folder inside My Documents by default.

The plugin takes a snapshot every 1/10th of a second and compares it with the previous snapshot. It’s added to the gif only if the two images are different. This cuts down the size of the resultant gif. You can read more about the plugin at the developer Jon Galloway’s post.

OPTION 2

LICEcap can capture an area of your desktop and save it directly to .GIF (for viewing in web browsers, etc) or .LCF (see below). 

LICEcap is an intuitive but flexible application (for Windows and now OSX), that is designed to be lightweight and function with high performance. 

LICEcap is easy to use: view a demo (output is here). 

In addition to .GIF, LICEcap supports its own native lossless .LCF file format, which allows for higher compression ratios than .GIF, higher quality (more than 256 colors per frame), and more accurate timestamping. If you record to .LCF, you can later convert to .GIF (using the included command line utility), or play back the .LCF files directly within REAPER. 

LICEcap is GPL free software, each download package includes the source. 

Features and options:

• Record directly to .GIF or .LCF.
• Move the screen capture frame while recording.
• Pause and restart recording, with optional inserted text messages.
• Global hotkey (shift+space) to toggle pausing while recording
• Adjustable maximum recording framerate, to allow throttling CPU usage.
• Basic title frame, with or without text.
• Record mouse button presses.
• Display elapsed time in the recording.

Requirements:

• For Windows: Windows XP/Vista/7 (might work with reduced functionality on other versions)
• For OSX: OS 10.4+, PPC or Intel (note: OS X support is still in alpha, some features are not supported)
• A reasonably fast CPU
• A healthy amount of RAM (1GB+, especially when encoding to LCF)

Latest version:

LICEcap v1.2 for Windows (8/4/11) (432kb installer)
LICEcap v1.2 for OSX (Note: alpha version) (8/4/11) (800kb DMG)

• Allow user to set capture dimensions before recording
• Insert text frames (when paused) - via JeffOS, thanks JeffOS!
• OSX version: v1.2alpha (doesn't support proper cursors or mouse status or hotkeys, but somewhat usable)

Old versions:

LICEcap v1.1 (6/9/10) (389kb installer)
• Fixed LCF export for widths not multiples of 4
• Added hotkey for pause (shift+space)
LICEcap v1.0 (6/7/10) (389kb installer)
• First release

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