On this blog, I often use screenshots to illustrate tutorials. This leads to long blog posts and I never feel like the full context is there because they’re not animated. I avoided trying to capture animations because, in my experience, the software out there to do so was buggy or overly complex and added more burden value.

Well, no more. Thanks to a colleague’s suggestions, I found ScreenToGif. It’s a quick/painless download & install.

It’s also available via Chocolatey. Run choco install screentogif and you’ll have it in no time.

How to demo this? I went a little meta on things. :) See below for a gif of a ScreenToGif capture of itself capturing a window for a little tutorial.

The app is well built and fulfills its main purspoe with relatively little cruft. Best of all, it’s free and open source! I definitely recommend adding it to your toolbox.

Let me know if you have any questions or similar tools in the comments.

Great Tool Spotlight: Animate it with ScreenToGif was originally published by Sean Killeen at SeanKilleen.com on November 10, 2015.