![]() When ready, click “Stop” and - you’re done! Your animated GIF is ready to play. Anything that happens under the LICECap window will become part of the GIF you create. You can operate another program, recording menus and mouse clicks. LICECap begins recording that section of screen. You click “Record”, choose a destination folder and file-name for your video, and click “Save”. You drag this window by its corners, till it surrounds the area of your screen that you want to record as a GIF. It consisted of a frame with a menu and one window - and nothing inside the window! I deleted and reinstalled the program, with the same result.įinally, I realized that the empty window is as it should be. When I first ran LICECap, I thought the program had stalled during opening. Don’t let somebody else’s PR snafu put you off. If you haven’t heard before of LICECap, it’s because Cockos can’t afford a consultant to tell them the name needs rethinking: I haven’t been able to find out what “LICE” stands for, but it sounds like something to do with capturing vermin. LICECap is owned by a company called Cockos Incorporated, which provides this wonderful program, for Mac and Windows platforms, free of charge. (SPOILER ALERT: GifCam has now become my favorite. Since both programs work similarly, I’ll discuss LICECap first, then add my impressions of GifCam. It’s in some ways better and more powerful than LICECap - the only drawback is that it’s for Windows only. UPDATE: Since writing the above, I’ve been alerted by Vasco Reggiando to an even easier-to-use program: GifCam. There may have been a good reason having nothing to do with the app, so I’ll try again.īut for the moment, my best, favorite way to generate moving GIF files is with an open-source desktop program called (drumroll!) LICECap. Couldn’t send it to myself by email, either. The program looked good and worked well, until I actually made a GIF and tried to save it to my photo gallery. One exception I’ve tried is GifMill (on iOS). Only thus can you get a copy for yourself. Then you have to “share” the result via the vendor’s “network”. ![]() Typically, however, these apps are social networks in themselves: You have to log in and work online. There are a number of mobile apps to generate GIFs from the videos you take with your tablet or smartphone. Sometimes you can overcome these limits by buying their premium service. All the “free” sites I’ve tried have crippling limits: They restrict your file size, your frame rate, your duration, or something else. For example, you can take normal video and upload it to a website that will convert it to GIF for you. Now you can.Īs you’d expect, there are countless ways to generate GIF files, and more appear daily. Google Plussers post animated GIFs all the time - touching, funny, instructive, sometimes bizarre.Īnd you’d love to make your own. They don’t distract you from Google Plus ads because there aren’t any ads in Google Plus. Specifically, those “personalized” ads Facebook parades in front of me, with messages like “Hot singles ready to mingle! Right here in Knoxville!” Facebook knows everything about me except that my wife and I consider these ads offensive, to use one of my more family-friendly adjectives.īut if, like me, you prefer the Google Plus ecosystem, then you know the power and value of animated GIFs. They’re currently banned by Facebook, which argues that GIFs would clutter up the newsfeeds of Facebook users, distracting them from more important concerns.įacebook is right: Animated GIFs would distract Facebookers from the far more important clutter of - Facebook ads. Especially in social media, at least if your network of choice is Google Plus. GIF files are nowadays extremely popular and in high demand. We’re back to the age of silent movies! They’re a medium in which Charlie Chaplin would have felt right at home. Did I mention “silently”? A GIF file, even when it moves, is not true video and therefore doesn’t include sound. Today’s computers easily juggle their large files and multiple frames-per-second. Sometime last year, GIF movies silently roared back into prominence. Heavily overused, these soon became boring and unfashionable. They tended to consist of dancing stick figures or rotating logos. GIF animations were therefore mostly cartoonish. ![]() Computers of that age, known as abacuses, were incapable of the heavy lifting required for moving high-resolution images. GIF - the “graphics interchange format” - was pioneered by Compuserve during the Mesozoic Era.
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