Is there a Mac screen capture tool that will export to animated gif?

Question

I'm looking for a screen capture tool working on MacOSX that will export the capture to animated gif.

Answer 1

LICEcap is free (GPL), works on MacOSX, and capture animated GIF directly.

http://www.cockos.com/licecap/

It's never too late ;-)

Answer 2

Semi-automated process:

If you need to capture video and convert it to GIF, or a very long involved sequence of steps, then you'll need to combine two separate programs. A video screen capture tool, and a movie to gif conversion tool.

Look at these two questions for possible solutions:

Screen video capture application

How can I convert a .mov into a .gif (or a .apng)?

There don't seem to be that many apps that do the movie --> gif conversion on OS X, though. A lot of people use VLC to capture frames and imagemagick to collect them back together into an animated gif. This is probably why the only answer to the conversion question above used an online service.

Manual process:

There is a way to do it in OS X without an additional tool, and this works well if, for instance, you just want to show someone the sequence of steps to disable a particular system preference. The basic process is this:

1. Use Cmd-shift-4-spacebar to capture a screenshot of the window for each frame.
2. Convert the images to gif (or set your screenshot preferences to gif prior to capturing the screenshots)
3. Open the last screenshot in preview.
4. Open the sidebar in preview
5. Show the screenshots in finder, ordered by date
6. Select the remainder to the screenshots, drag and drop them directly on top of the icon in the sidebar of preview for the file already opened. If you drop them elsewhere it won't add them properly.
7. Preview the animation by selecting the top icon in the sidebar, then using the down arrow. Rearrange any that are out of order using the sidebar to drag and drop.
8. Save the document as gif, and then preview using a browser, or another app that shows animated gifs.

This technique is somewhat limited in that you can't easily capture video frames without pausing the video before each capture (for that you should get a video screencapture program and then convert the resulting mov or avi to animated gif), and you can't readily adjust the frame time for each frame.

There's a more detailed tutorial with example here:

http://ipliance.com/index.php/eng/Blog/Howto-Animated-GIF-s-Creation-and-Display-in-OS-X

Answer 3

In macOS Catalina simply press ⇧⌘5 (Shift-Command-5) and you can choose from the following:

• Capture Entire Screen
• Capture Selected Window
• Capture Selected Portion
• Record Entire Screen
• Record Selected Portion

Afterwards, if you want to convert the MOV file into a GIF, you can use brew install gifski (gifski is free at the time of this post) or GIF Brewery 3, which is 4.99 (sorry, it used to be free) on the Mac App Store.

Answer 4

I just used www.convert-image.com to convert a Keynote-export QuickTime movie file in to an animated GIF and it worked great. The process was relatively painless and the end results was a animation I used to answer a question here on AskDifferent: How to partially uncover bullet points in Keynote

Answer 5

There is a really fantastic guide at http://opensourcehacker.com/2012/11/21/creating-animated-gif-screen-captures-on-osx/

In summary

1. Record video using QuickTime Player
2. Converting the screen capture video to animated GIF (with GIF Brewery)
3. Crop and shrink the capture area
4. Use low FPS

Answer 6

I am using a utility called Claquette. It can be used to convert video files to GIFs and it also comes with an integrated screen recorder.
The app is a free download on the Mac App Store.
It's editing capabilities are very limited (just crop & trim), but usually that's enough for me.

To compare the results, I replicated the GIF in your question. My version came up as a ~35s long animation with a file size of 511KB:

There are plenty of other tools out there - I went with this one because it provided the best quality/size trade-offs in the exported GIFs (which I usually attach to a newsletter service with size limitations).

Answer 7

Use Apple Quicktime Player (in the Applications folder) and make a New Screen Recording:

You can either create a full-screen recording, or you can draw a selection box around any part of the screen and record just the selected area.

Much more information is found at Apple Support and is especially handy as it shows the interface changes between the Mojave and the Catalina versions for Screen recording.