gif_snapshot

A one-button tool for recording your screen to a GIF

What is this for?

Have you ever wanted to take a quick video of your screen and instantly save it as a GIF, with only one button press? Look no further! "But mate, why would I wanna do that" Perspicacious question! Here's some use cases:

• You're playing a game and you absolutely have to send your stupid shenanigans to everyone on your Discord groups. Send them all a GIF snapshot and get yelled at!
• You're playing a space sim with your new friend and he has no idea where to find his orbital flight controls among the 34 nested menus. Send him a GIF snapshot, then yell at him!
• You're playing a game riddled with technical bugs, your co-op mate is waiting for you to activate the Mega Tower but for some reason you can't find it. Send him a GIF snapshot and find out that the tower does NOT show up in your game instance!

And here's some eye candy to get you hooked:

Perfect landing in Elite Dangerous

How to google stuff

"Only the best rally game ever made" - Mr T.

How do I get it?

Here's the step-by-step instructions to get it running (WARNING, this has been tested on Windows 10 only):

• Install imagemagick for Windows from here;
• Clone this repository by entering git clone https://github.com/Cy-r0/gif_snapshot/ in your terminal, or just press the green button that says "Clone or Download" in the top-right corner of the Github page and download a .zip if you don't know what a terminal is. You can put this repository in any folder you like;
• Execute gif_snapshot.exe, or, if you don't trust it, read through gif_snapshot.ahk yourself, then download AutoHotKey from here and run it.

Optional: This script will stop running if you shutdown or restart your pc. If you want it to always be on:

• Press Win + R;
• Type shell:startup and the startup directory will open;
• Right-click gif_snapshot.exe, select "Copy", left-click into the startup folder, select "Paste shortcut".

Usage

• Press the Print Screen button on your keyboard. You'll hear a sound meaning that recording has started;
• After 7 seconds you'll hear another sound, meaning that recording has stopped and the GIF is being generated;
• After another 5ish seconds, you'll hear a third sound, meaning that your GIF has been generated and can be found in the gifs directory inside the repository (that directory doesn't exist yet, but it will be automatically generated when the time comes).

Specs

The GIFs generated by the script are 7 seconds long at 6.67 fps, with a resolution of 640x360 px and a bit-depth of 5. These settings strike a good balance between GIF generation time, CPU load and image quality, and can't be changed unless you edit the script yourself. Also, Discord has a pretty small max attachment size of 8 MB so it's going to be difficult to increase duration, fps or resolution of the GIF without exceeding this. Also also, if you have a 21:9 monitor, the script will cut away the side bars so that the final GIF is 16:9. This probably doesn't make a lot of sense at first glance, but in GIFs instant understanding is of paramount importance. 21:9 is simply too long and thin and it results in the GIF being harder to understand immediately compared to a 16:9 GIF.

Acknowledgements

Sincere thanks to tic (Tariq Porter) for his most excellent AutoHotKey GDI+ Library (https://www.autohotkey.com/boards/viewtopic.php?t=6517).