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Screen to GIF

Record your screen, application window, or browser tab and convert it directly to an animated GIF. Perfect for tutorials, bug reports, presentations, and sharing quick demos - all processed in your browser for maximum privacy.

Screen to GIF Recorder

Capture your screen activity and convert it to an animated GIF - directly in your browser.

Entire Screen
Application Window
Browser Tab
100% private - all processing happens in your browser
Related Tools
Screen Capture Video to GIF GIF Maker GIF Editor Compress GIF GIF to MP4 GIF Reverse

How to Record Your Screen as a GIF

  1. Click the recording area above to begin. Your browser will ask you to choose a screen, window, or tab to capture.
  2. Adjust the recording settings - FPS, quality, resolution, and maximum duration to suit your needs.
  3. Click "Start Recording" and perform the actions you want to capture on screen.
  4. Click "Stop & Convert" when finished. The tool will encode your recording into an animated GIF.
  5. Preview the result and download your GIF. You can also use our GIF compressor to reduce the file size.

Best Use Cases

Bug Reports

Show developers exactly what went wrong. A screen recording GIF is worth a thousand words when filing issues. You can also annotate the result with our image annotator.

Tutorials

Create quick step-by-step guides that show rather than tell. GIFs auto-play in documentation, emails, and chat apps - no video player needed.

Demos

Showcase product features, UI interactions, or workflow automations. Perfect for README files, pull requests, and presentations.

Social Media

Share quick screen captures on Twitter, Slack, Discord, and forums. GIFs play inline without requiring users to click a video link.

Settings Guide

FPS

Frames per second controls smoothness. Use 5-10 FPS for UI walkthroughs, 15 FPS for smooth demos, and 20-30 FPS for animations. Lower FPS means smaller files.

Quality

Controls color accuracy and dithering. A value of 1 gives the best quality (slowest encoding), while 20 gives the fastest encoding with acceptable quality.

Max Width

Scales the output down to fit the selected width while maintaining aspect ratio. Smaller dimensions dramatically reduce file size. For full-screen recordings, 640px is a good balance. Need to resize later? Try our GIF resizer.

Frequently Asked Questions

Screen recording works in Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Opera on desktop. Safari has limited support. Mobile browsers do not support the Screen Capture API. For best results, we recommend using the latest version of Chrome or Edge.

No. Everything happens entirely in your browser. Your screen capture is never sent to any server - the recording, frame extraction, and GIF encoding all run locally on your device using JavaScript.

GIF file size depends on resolution, FPS, duration, and scene complexity. To reduce size: lower the FPS (10 is usually enough), reduce max width to 640px or less, keep recordings short, and avoid capturing fast-moving or complex content. You can also compress the result with our GIF compressor.

GIF is an image format and does not support audio. If you need audio with your screen recording, consider using our Video to GIF converter - record your screen natively, then convert the video file to GIF.

You can record up to 60 seconds. Longer recordings at high FPS will produce very large GIF files and may take longer to encode. For most use cases, 5-15 second recordings work best.

When your browser prompts you to choose what to share, you can select a specific application window or browser tab instead of the entire screen. This is the easiest way to capture just the area you need. For cropping after recording, try our GIF cropper.