How to Make a GIF from a Screen Recording

Screen recording GIFs are everywhere — software tutorials, bug reports, UI demonstrations, game clips, how-to guides. Converting a screen recording into a GIF takes just a few steps and produces a file that plays directly in any browser, email client, or messaging app without needing a video player. Here is how to do it on both Mac and Windows, with tips for getting a clean result.

Recording Your Screen

On Mac, press Command + Shift + 5 to open the screenshot toolbar. Select the screen recording option (the icon that looks like a dotted rectangle with a circle), choose whether to record the entire screen or a selected portion, and click Record. When you are done, click the Stop button in the menu bar. macOS saves the recording as a .mov file on your desktop by default.

On Windows 10 and 11, press Windows + G to open the Game Bar. Click the Record button (the filled circle) to start recording the current window, and click it again to stop. The recording saves as an MP4 to your Videos/Captures folder. Alternatively, the Snipping Tool on Windows 11 has a built-in screen recording mode — open it, switch to the video recording mode, select your area, and hit Start.

For a dedicated screen recording tool that also handles GIF export directly, ScreenToGif (Windows only, free) records your screen and writes the output as a GIF in one step, bypassing the conversion entirely. Kap (Mac, free) does the same thing on macOS.

Converting the Recording to a GIF

Once you have a .mov or .mp4 file, open the GIFDB MP4 to GIF converter in your browser. Upload the recording, set your start and end points to trim out any dead time at the beginning or end of the capture, choose a resolution, and hit Convert. For screen content — text, UI elements, cursor movements — 720p or even 1080p is worth considering because sharpness matters more for legible text than for most other GIF content. At 720p, a 5-second screen recording GIF is typically around 4–8 MB depending on how much is changing on screen.

Optimizing Screen Recording GIFs

Screen content tends to compress well because large portions of the frame stay static between frames — a toolbar, a background, a logo. Tools that perform frame optimization (removing unchanged pixel regions between frames) exploit this efficiently. Ezgif's Optimize tool is good at this: upload your GIF, enable frame optimization, and it will significantly reduce the file size for recordings where the cursor is the only thing moving in most frames.

Frame rate is less critical for screen recordings than for live-action video. A software tutorial GIF at 10 fps is usually easy to follow and keeps the file much smaller than 24 fps. For demos involving fast scrolling, smooth animation, or quick cursor movements, go up to 15 or 24 fps to avoid choppiness.

Using ScreenToGif Directly

ScreenToGif on Windows records directly to GIF without an intermediate video file. After installing it, open the app and click Recorder. A transparent window appears that you can position and resize over the area you want to capture. Click Record, do your demonstration, then click Stop. The app's built-in editor lets you delete frames, trim the ends, add text or drawings, and adjust frame timing before exporting. For quick screen demos where you do not need high color fidelity, this all-in-one workflow saves several steps.

Cropping and Focusing the View

Full-screen recordings are almost always too large for a good GIF. A 1920x1080 screen recording converted at full resolution produces an enormous file and shows a lot of irrelevant interface. Before converting, crop the recording to the area of the screen that actually matters. In the GIFDB converter, the crop tool lets you draw a selection over just the relevant portion of the frame. In Photoshop, use Image then Crop after importing the video frames. Focusing on a 400x300 or 600x400 region rather than the full screen typically cuts the file size by 70–80% without losing any of the important content.

For more on all the ways to make GIFs, see the main how to make GIFs guide. If your screen recording GIF is still too large after conversion, the guide on making GIFs smaller has the specific compression steps. For adding a text label or caption to your screen GIF, the text overlay guide covers the browser tools and Photoshop workflow.