Record screen into GIF on Mac

Mac OS has the built-in utility to help its users capture screen and save them as static screenshots in PNG, JPG formats or record screen as videos. Animated gifs are the great alternative between static images and full-size videos. If you want to share your screen capture or recording as animated GIF files, you need to use a third-party GIF creator, such as PicGIF for Mac. You can see how it can convert photos and even videos to animated GIFs quickly on Mac. It is however a waste of time. Today, we will introduce a new GIF recorder for Mac which can record your Mac screen and save it directly as GIF.

What you need is only Gifox – the GIF recording and sharing app. Creating short animated GIF from the screen was made fantastically simple by this GIF recording app. Get this app from Mac App Store onto your computer and follow below steps to record your Mac screen into animated GIF images.

Run the GIF recorder from Launchpad on your Mac. If it is the first time you run it, you will be asked to choose Output directory where all the GIF recordings to be saved to. You can then find it on the status bar. Gifox is a status bar app which lives in the top right corner of your computer screen. Click the Gifox icon from Apple status bar, you can then click on area or window mode button to start recording. See below screenshot.

gifox record screen into gif on mac
gifox record screen into gif on mac

Click the area icon to select area for recording, or select window icon to select an open window to record. Or you can use shortcuts to start recording, Cmd+Shift+5 for area selection and recording mode, Cmd+Shift+6 for window selection and recording. You can customize the shortcuts from Gifox Preferences > Shortcuts.

Once you have selected the area or window, you will have the on-screen float controls to start, stop, cancel the recordings. When you stop the recording, a new GIF image will automatically save to the destination folder. You can share GIF wherever you want. You can also go to its Preferences > Sharing to add your Dropbox, GoogleDrive or Imgur to easily share your recordings. By doing so, your GIF recordings can be copied or drag-and-dropped directly into other integrated apps straight from the status bar.

Want to record screen to GIF in Windows?

You can use ShareX as the GIF recorder on Windows computer. It is a free and open source program that lets you capture or record any area of your screen to GIF on PC with many other useful features.