GUIDE

How to turn a screen recording into a GIF on Windows

23 August 2026

You have a short clip and you need it to play inline in a chat, an issue or a README, where a video file will not. The short version: ScreenToGif is free, open source and excellent at exactly this. A GIF is worth it only for something short and silent — past about fifteen seconds an MP4 is smaller, sharper and easier to watch.

The free way: ScreenToGif

ScreenToGif records straight to GIF and lets you delete individual frames before you save, which is the part most tools lack.

  1. Install ScreenToGif and choose Recorder.
  2. Size the capture frame over what you want and record.
  3. In the editor, trim the ends and delete any frames you do not need.
  4. File → Save as → Gif.

If you already have an MP4 and only need to convert it, the same editor will open a video file and export it as a GIF.

Where the free options fall short

The Xbox Game Bar and Clipchamp both record and export video, but neither writes a GIF, so you end up converting afterwards in a third tool. Web converters do work, but you are uploading the recording to somebody else’s server to do it, which is the wrong trade for anything showing an internal system, a customer name or a bug in a private product.

What Clarus adds

Record, trim and export in the same window: put the clip on the timeline, cut it to the part that matters, then pick GIF next to Export. It exports at 15 fps, scaled to 720 px wide, and builds a colour palette from your actual footage rather than using a fixed one — which is the difference between clean flat UI colours and the banded, dithered look GIFs are known for.

Anything you added on the timeline comes with it: arrows, text, step numbers, and blur baked into the frames rather than laid over them.

Limits worth knowing before you commit

GIF has no sound. Not a Clarus decision — the format has no audio track at all, so narration is dropped whatever tool you use. If the clip needs a voice, it needs to stay a video.

GIF is big. A ten-second screen recording is comfortably several megabytes as a GIF and a few hundred kilobytes as an MP4, because GIF is limited to 256 colours per frame and cannot compress across time the way video does.

Fifteen frames a second. Fine for scrolling and clicking, visibly steppy for fast cursor movement or video playing inside the recording.

Which to choose

For a one-off, ScreenToGif is free and hard to beat. Clarus is worth it if the recording needs trimming or annotating first and you would rather not move the file between three applications to get there — and if uploading the footage to a web converter is not something you are willing to do.

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