Capture GIF is intended for capturing screen activity. In this respect, the tool can record anything happening on your desktop and save it as an animated GIF file. The application sits quietly in the System Tray, without obstructing your normal workflow. It can be activated by both clicking its icon there or typing specific keyboard combinations.
Before starting to record, the tool asks you to select the mode. This way, you can grab the entire screen, a window or a custom region. In this regard, it has the advantage of recording the menu bar area, which other tools cannot.
Although Capture GIF works quite well from out of the box, there are a few options you may want to tweak. For instance, it is good that it supports recording from any of the connected displays, so you can pick the one you will be capturing activity from. Likewise, it is possible to capture mouse cursor, which is ideal for software tutorial and demonstrations. Good news is that you can configure custom keyboard shortcuts for starting and stopping recording. Moreover, you can set parameters like FPS, with an impact on the quality of the resulting video. Finally, the application also lets you set the desired delay time and loop count.
The animated GIFs created by this tool have a high quality. Once you stop the recording, you have the chance to preview the captured images. However, compared with other similar tools, this one has some limitations. In my opinion, most of them are related to the impossibility to save the captured images in other formats, such as static pictures and standard video. Similarly, it does not come with basic editing features, like cropping or rotating.
All in all, Capture GIF is a small unobtrusive application you can use to record display activity and share it with others in animated GIF format. The product can be bought from the developer’s site, and luckily, there is a trial version available there.
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