Giphy Capture is one of my most used pieces of software

Promotional art of Giphy Capture, courtesy of their website

As a software engineer, my job is 30% writing code and 70% communicating to others about that code. That ratio is probably wwrong, but you get the point.

Whether it’s on slack, in a pull request, or a blog post, I often find I need a quick gif or video of “how this works.”

There are a ton of screen recording programs out there. I’ve tried them all. Loom, QuickTime, Camtasia, OBS, and more. All of them are pretty good tools for recording your whole screen. But what I find I really need when trying to share “how this works” is a quick recording of a small portion of my screen.

I don’t need video encoding. I rarely need audio. I don’t need in-depth editing tools.

Giphy Capture not only checks all of those boxes, but the editing is fast and it saves everything as a gif or mp4 in seconds.

I’ve been using Giphy Capture since 2017. A coworker at Netflix told me about it when I asked her how she made a gif on a pull request, and I’ve never looked back.

Simply open the program up, drag it over the part of the screen you want to record, then hit record. That’s it.

Me using Giphy Capture to record a small part of my screen

When you’re done, click on the video thumbnail at the bottom of the window, and access Giphy’s trim tools. You can reduce it’s resolution (which can help with file size), and then save it as a gif or mp4.

Me using Giphy Capture’s trim tool to quickly trim my recording before saving

No fuss, no muss, no bells and whistles.

Want to record a simple click interaction you’re working on for a form? Giphy Capture let’s you record just that.

The gif I created for this blog post of this blog post… very meta

Want to record your iOS simulator to test a Mobile Safari specific bug (because we’ve all had to deal with those)?

Giphy Capture makes that easy.

I don’t have to record my whole screen. I don’t have to edit raw video output saved in some random folder that I can never find. I don’t have to wait for a huge app to load with clunky controls that hijack everything.

Open Giphy Capture. Drag it over what I want to record. Save. Close the program.

Granted, there is a lot you can do with this tool. You can create memes, upload to giphy directly, connect with social media, and more. But I’ve literally never used any of those features.

What matters is that Giphy Capture got the most important thing right: they made it free and easy to use.