Ability to create a .gif animation

[Netroxen]

This is very useful in my web development, especially when creating tickets for issues on the frontend, however sometimes I'd like to demonstrate a usability or animation issue, for this it would be epic if there was a .gif creator. I little record button after making my selection with a configurable framerate in the settings would do wonders!

[lidel]

@Netroxen for now try Peek (a standalone animated GIF recorder).
But I agree, would be super neat to have it all in one tool.

[Netroxen]

@lidel yup I've actually been using Peek for a while, but this tool is absolutely the best I've found for quickly annotating and taking screenshots, so a GIF recorder would elevate this to mind blown.

I'll keep using Peek for the moment though...

[Bios-Marcel]

tip for those using a tiling window manager: You can't use peek, since it doesn't seem to work well with a tiling window manager, instead you could use this:

#!/usr/bin/env sh

[ $# -lt 2 ] && \
  echo 'You have to pass a duration in seconds and a filename: "gif.sh 10 /tmp/record.gif"' && \
  exit 1

byzanz-record                                        \
  --cursor                                           \
  --verbose                                          \
  --delay=2                                          \
  --duration=${1}                                    \
  $(xrectsel "--x=%x --y=%y --width=%w --height=%h") \
  "${2}"

[bhayward93]

Much appreciated @Bios-Marcel , you've saved me quite the headache.

[NatoBoram]

@lidel Peek doesn't work at the moment for recording GIFs.

Another alternative is Kazam, but it doesn't support GIF. Another alternative is Green Recorder, but it has the same issue.

[MichaelTunnell]

I dont think flameshot intends to be a video recorder so it would be better to check out something else such as SimpleScreenRecorder.

SSR does support saving as a GIF but honestly, DONT do that. You should always record as a video, preferably MKV or MP4, and then convert that to a GIF once you have it perfect for the GIF. Recording straight to GIF will lose so much quality and be gigantic filesizes.

In fact, I would suggest abandoning GIFs all together for big captures as direct video play is now available on most browsers even most mobile browsers via HTML5 so you dont need the GIF format anymore.

Even sites like Imgur default to Videos instead of GIFs because of this reason.

[Oatelaus]

To follow up on @Bios-Marcel

I'm using i3 and Peek, it works fine! Not sure if it's a change with Peek or if Bios was using a different tiling wm.

It's a floating window so you'll obviously need to consider that when using it, and if you were smart about it you could probably nicely control the window size/position via i3 commands to emulate full-screen/full-window etc.

[nitrocode]

Here are some gif tools on OSX

https://github.com/onmyway133/GifCapture
https://github.com/NickeManarin/ScreenToGif

brew install gifcapture

[adamscafuto]

I would throw in my two cents and point out another screenshot program (Gyazo) has a ~10 second GIF capture feature, so why would Flameshot not have it?

[NatoBoram]

Oh hey old thread but if you record a video, you can convert it to GIF while keeping the quality. It's just that ffmpeg doesn't do it by default so it looks like garbage, but it's possible. The command is just... impossible to type or remember.

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "split[s0][s1];[s0]palettegen[p];[s1][p]paletteuse" -loop 0 output.gif

As a side note, that's how ShareX records GIFs if I remember correctly. It just converts the video at the end of the recording, which is simply amazing.

[gladykov]

Peek is being deprecated because (along other reasons) author thinks GIF is a thing of a past, since video is now widely supported: phw/peek#1191

That said, I would love to see video support in Flameshot, because it has such a nice interface. My benchmark is Windows program called Screenpresso, which could also visually show mouse clicks - very helpful thins for QAs . Right now I'm using Kazam next to Flameshot. It is simple but misses customization and Flameshot overlay UI, so Kazam + Flameshot would be a perfect blend.

[Doonut]

I have used flameshot for longer than I remember. I have it bound to a keybind calling flameshot gui. I think with that, there are tons of mountains to cross because of how flameshot works to implement this, like completely freezing the window when I call that command which I very do use and like. For example, if I were to call that command, the window freezes, then I take time to resize my window, etc. what about the actual content that changed in the last x seconds and I want a gif? But then if you add that functionality, what about the speed of the application you love that disappears because it needs to buffer the last y seconds just in case you take a video? I would absolutely adore this functionality, but I believe it should at least be a separate call, if not a fork of flameshot with another name, so it could only focus on video and be a separate instead of what flameshot currently does, which is implement everything you want in a screenshot and be VERY fast about it.

[zhaynoth]

Having it would be great, it is very useful on development/testing communications

[heyakyra]

Kooha supports gif and you can even use a modern codec like AV1

[r0bag]

+1

[tuananh]

@Netroxen for now try Peek (a standalone animated GIF recorder). But I agree, would be super neat to have it all in one tool.

this is amazing piece of software, along with flameshot :)

[ragnarok22]

The Peek project has been declared deprecated 😢