How to make a GIF of your screen on Windows

To make a GIF of your screen on Windows, record a small region for a few seconds, cut it down to one action, and export it at a low frame rate. ScreenToGif, ShareX and LICEcap all do this for free. Focal, a screen recorder for Windows, does it with zooms and a smooth cursor that keep a small GIF readable, and it exports the same recording as an MP4 when a video would serve better.

My name is Vince. I make Focal, and I have watched four-second loops of my own app more times than any person should. If all that watching taught me one thing, it is that a good GIF is mostly decided before you press record.

When a GIF is the right format, and when it is not

A GIF plays by itself, anywhere an image shows, with no play button. That is the whole case for it. Put one in a README, a pull request, a Slack or Teams message or a docs page, and the reader sees the thing happen as they scroll past. A video in the same place often waits for a click, and a play button is a polite request that plenty of people decline.

It is the wrong format for anything longer than about ten seconds, anything with speech, and anything where color matters. Each frame holds at most 256 colors, there is no sound at all, and the file grows with every frame, because GIF compression is old and weak next to a modern video codec. Save a thirty-second walkthrough as a GIF and you get a big file that still looks worse than the video.

GIF or MP4

The rule I use, which has settled every format argument I have ever had with myself: if the place you are posting plays video inline, send an MP4. If it only shows images, or the point is that it moves before anyone touches it, send a GIF and keep it short.

Free tools for a GIF on Windows

These are the three free tools most people reach for. I checked each one, and the GitHub limits further down, on their own sites on 2026-11-02.

• ScreenToGif records a region of the screen, a webcam or a sketchboard, opens the recording in an editor, and saves it as a GIF, an APNG, a video or images. It is open source under the Microsoft Public License, with its code on GitHub. Its old address now leads to N-Studio, the same developer’s successor app, which has a free tier and a paid Professional one. ScreenToGif itself is still offered there as the legacy version and was last updated on 2026-07-28.
• ShareX is a free, open source screenshot tool for Windows, and screen recording to a video or straight to a GIF are among its capture methods. It does far more than GIFs, so expect more settings on the way to your first one.
• LICEcap from Cockos is GPL free software for Windows and macOS. It records a frame on your desktop straight to a GIF, lets you move the frame and pause while recording, and caps the frame rate. The last release is v1.32 from June 2022. Some software is abandoned and some is simply finished, and LICEcap still does its one job like the second kind.

If you want to fix a GIF frame by frame, ScreenToGif’s editor is made for exactly that.

What makes a GIF small and readable

The same rules hold in every tool, roughly in order of how much they save. Most of them come down to showing less, which is harder than it sounds when the whole screen is your work and you are fond of all of it.

1. Record a small region. File size follows pixel count. A region around the one panel that matters is a fraction of a full screen, and the text in it stays at its real size.
2. Keep it short. Two to eight seconds. Every frame is stored, so length is size.
3. Show one action. One click, one menu, one result. If it takes three steps, make three GIFs or make a video.
4. Loop cleanly. End on the screen you started on and trim the pause at each end, so the loop reads as one motion and not as a jump.
5. Lower the frame rate. An interface reads fine at 10 to 15 frames a second. A GIF at 60 fps stores four times the frames of one at 15, for motion nobody needs.
6. Use fewer colors. Flat interfaces need far fewer than 256. Gradients, shadows, photos and blurred backgrounds are what cost colors, and they are what bands. Dithering hides banding with noise, and the noise makes the file bigger.
7. Shrink the pixel size last. Scaling a frame down blurs text. Record smaller in the first place, and shrink only when the file is still too big.

Making one with Focal, step by step

Focal records the screen without the cursor and keeps the cursor’s path, clicks and key timings as data. So what the GIF shows is decided after recording, at your desk, and not while you are busy doing the thing. The guide to recording your screen without the cursor explains why that helps.

1. Pick the region. Press Print Screen, then click a window to snap to it, or drag a region around the part that matters. If ShareX or another program already owns Print Screen, Focal uses Ctrl+PrtSc and tells you. The smallest recording is 256 x 144. Leave the microphone and system audio off, since a GIF cannot carry them. If the GIF shows a keyboard shortcut, set keystrokes to Shortcuts to show it as a pill on the video.
2. Do the one action. After a countdown, a small control bar shows the time with pause and stop. Clicks on the bar never cause a zoom, so stopping does not leave a stray zoom at the end.
3. Trim on the timeline. The editor opens when you stop, with zooms already made from your clicks. Trim the start and the end, split out a wait in the middle, or speed up a clip that drags. Or leave the recording whole and press I and O around the moment you want: the export takes only that part.
4. Let the zooms do the reading. A zoom on the click lets a small GIF show small text at a size people can read. Delete the zooms you do not need, or press Z to add one. The camera eases in and out like a spring, so the GIF still reads as one motion. The guide to zoom effects covers shaping them by hand.
5. Check the cursor. The raw mouse path becomes a steady glide with a ripple on each click, which matters in a GIF because nothing else tells the viewer a click happened. The standard cursors are drawn as vectors, so they stay sharp inside a zoom, and the cursor fades when idle.
6. Keep the look plain. Background, padding, corners and shadow live in Styles. For a GIF, a little padding and no busy background leave more of the 256 colors for the interface itself, which is the part anyone came to see.
7. Export. Export with the GIF preset. When the place you are posting plays video inline, export the same recording as an MP4 with H.264 instead, up to 4K at 60 fps. You can save presets of your own beside it. The formats are listed in the exports section of the home page.

Exporting, a GIF included, needs a license. Recording and editing are free with every feature and no time limit, and until you enter a key the editor’s preview shows a “Made with Focal” watermark. You can download the trial with no card and no account.

For a three-second loop of one toggle, any of the free tools above is quicker to open than Focal, and I say that as the person who would very much like you to open Focal. Focal earns its place when the GIF has to be read: small text, a click that has to be seen, or a step that needs a zoom to make sense.

Using it in a README or a pull request

A GIF at the top of a README shows what a project does before anyone reads a word. One in a pull request shows the change working, which makes a stronger case than “works on my machine” ever has. GitHub takes GIFs up to 10 MB in issues, pull requests and comments, and videos too, 10 MB on a free plan and 100 MB on a paid one, with H.264 recommended. The guide to screen recordings for READMEs, pull requests and bug reports goes further into both.