How to convert your screen recordings to GIF on macOS?

As frontend developers, you often need to share screenshots or video recordings to your Pull/Merge Requests, Issues or just on Slack.

And some platforms like Bitbucket don't accept videos but only images so a GIF is a good alternative.

So I recently created a tool to easily convert a video screen recording to a GIF. It is fast and generates a GIF small enough to be accepted by Bitbucket while high-resolution enough.

See the result by yourself:

Installation

You just need to install few libraries:

brew install ffmpeg imagemagick

# if you are using macOS silicon
arch -arm64 brew install ffmpeg imagemagick

Then you install this Apple shortcut: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/db18892750f3453c83d57281915be17f

Then enjoy!

On macOS, you can record your screen in a blink using CMD+Shift+5,

Once you have recorded your screen and you have a .MOV video, you can just convert to GIF using the context menu in the Finder:

An option to convert to GIF from a bash script is available too.

Details are available there: https://github.com/friedrith/productivity/blob/master/convert-video-to-gif.md

If you found this tool useful, don't hesitate to star the repository or post a comment below this post.