Record Animated GIFs Straight off Your Desktop with GifCam

Animated GIFs are a rage these days. Be it to make a point during a discussion on the forums, making a Reddit post to garner some up votes or just sharing a laugh with friends, animated GIF’s enjoy a much better position in today’s Internet. Heck Google even added support for animated GIF profile pictures in Google+.

But creating these GIF’s is never a simple task and we often resort to searching online for our suitable GIF. GifCam for Windows makes the process of creating GIF’s far easier than you ever thought and lets you directly record your screen for making animated GIF’s.

GifCam : Manufacturing GIF made easy for dummies

Being a tiny download at a meagre 685 KB, GifCam is a very handy tool to make Animated GIFs. The interface is extremely easy to use and is surprisingly simple for a GIF creator.

You are just presented with four buttons. The viewfinder in GifCam is basically the area which is recorded for the GIF. The record button lets you record the GIF until your PC eventually runs out of RAM or storage or till you decide to stop.

Oh and in case if you were wondering if the screen size is limited, you are in for a surprise when you realise that despite the maximize button being disabled, you can resize the window to basically near full screen size to have some huge GIF’s.  But note that these GIFs will easily take a decent chunk of your storage while also being way too slower.

Recording and Editing GIF’s in GifCam

GifCam offers you two ways to record your GIF’s. The first one is to just press record and capture your clip. Second method is to capture each frame indivdually by selecting the Frame button. This is a tedious way but offers a more granular control over your GIFs. This might be especially useful if you just want to display a quick slideshow of images in your GIF.

Once you are done capturing, you can edit your GIF with some limited options. For instance, you can delete unwanted frames either from starting or the end or just remove a specific frame. You can also add or remove a 0.1 second delay between the frames.

Saving Your GIF

GifCam offers you an array of options to save your clip. Saving the clips in 256 or 20 colors is often economical on the bandwidth. Also if you are done recording and editing a clip and want to start with a new one, you need to select New option in the menu.

Here is a sample GIF recorded off a YouTube video from Disney’s Cars.

Some Tips

• Don’t stretch the window size too much or you will end up with some really slow and bloated GIF’s.
• While Green Screen option might be nice and all, it is definitely annoying when you decide to make a GIF from your favourite movie. Do turn it off while editing.
• GifCam does allow unlimited recording time. But dont stretch it too long though, as anywhere beyond 10 seconds the file size can go over a megabyte easily.

Verdict

Gifcam is light on resources and is extremely snappy apart from being intuitive. The ability to record Gif’s of any size and length straight off your screen is a huge plus. GifCam is a must have tool for any Internet junkie out there.