How to record PC screen and turn it into GIF

There are plenty of programs to record the screen of our Windows PC. Most of these produce a video in MP4 format. This type of file, therefore, can be played on most devices, without taking up a lot of memory. However, many users have begun to prefer the GIF format for screen recording. The GIF in fact, are very small and can be sent and shared easily by e-mail.

However, there are not yet many programs that support video recording in GIF. But there are some programs that perform this job in an optimal way and in addition they are completely free, let’s see what they are:

ScreenToGif

This is the best tool currently available on the network to record video from a Windows PC screen and produce a GIF. It is easy to use and does its job very well. It is a portable app that allows us to record the Windows PC display and output a file in MP4 or GIF format.

Using it is really simple.

1. Let’s start the program;
2. We click on Recorder;
3. We can change the width and height in pixels of the portion of the screen we want to capture;
4. Click on Register;
5. Once completed click on Stop;
6. At this point an editor will open where we can edit the captured video;
7. Click on Save As;
8. We select the GIF entry and click on Save.

In a few steps we recorded the screen and converted the output to GIF format. Simple, no?

You can download the ScreenToGif software from this site.

vClip

It is a portable program really simple and intuitive to use. We have two options to change: frame rate control and output format. Unfortunately, the GIFs produced are of low quality, not on a par with those made with ScreenToGif.

1. We start the registration by clicking on Rec;
2. Let’s stop it by clicking on Stop;
3. Finally we can save it by clicking on Save in the format we have chosen.

Attention to correctly choose the format of the file in output.

We can download VClip by going to the official website.

LICEcap

It is one of the few applications to record videos that can compete with ScreenToGif, even if it has the defect of producing low quality GIFs. Unfortunately it does not have a built-in editor to edit the file to be generated, but despite this it is doing quite well.

We can change the FPS of the output file and we can also change the size of the area to be captured.

1. We start the recording by clicking on Record;
2. We choose where we want to save the GIF;
3. To conclude the registration click on Stop;
4. Without this we will have our GIF ready to be shared.

We can download LICEcap by going to  the official website and selecting the download for Windows. A version for macOS is also available.

Conclusions

As we have seen, there are still a few programs that allow you to record video on the screen and turn it into GIF. In addition, many of these are paid, sometimes offering worse results than the free ones that we have proposed in this article.