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I've had many people ask me either in a message or a post on forums (here, Unity, etc) how I create the animated gifs of my game projects.

Thought I would just make a post here on it and hopefully it will be of help to many people in one way or another.

So here is my workflow...

1. Record a video of the game (i.e. a clip of what I want to share)
2. Convert the video into a GIF.
3. Upload the GIF to image storage.
4. Link to it from the forum post.

There is an optional step and workflow in there so it can also be like this....

1. Create some images (perhaps screenshots or whatever)
2. Create a GIF from the images.
3. Upload the GIF to image storage.
4. Link to it from the forum post.


Record a Video of the Game

This is basically the heart of it. I tried for a long time to make decent videos and tested various things including FRAPS (the paid version), OBS, CamStudio and others. None of them produced decent smooth video especially in HD.

Finally in my research I came across Action! Screen Recording Software bought it and have been using it ever since.

It is the best video recording software I have tested and I stopped testing others after I bought it because I had no need to.

Okay, so just record a video of your game whatever it is you want to share.


Convert the Video into a GIF

I've tried different ways to do this as well including software and ultimately the easiest way I found and currently use is just to use this free online Video to GIF service here. I have used it for years now. If it goes away someday then I will look for another option. No sense in wasting time on that until it happens.

Okay so you convert your video into an animated GIF and download (save) it to your hard drive.


Create a GIF from Multiple Images

I've tried different ways to do this as well and the best method I have found and been using for years is simply buying GIF Movie Gear. Actually IIRC it also supports conversion of AVI videos and other sources into GIFs so I would probably just use this if needed for video conversion.

GIF Movie Gear is very easy to use and super easy to build GIFs out of multiple images as well as load existing GIFs and modify them.

Alright so you create a GIF out of multiple screenshots.


Upload the GIF image file to Online Image Storage

Again tried different places. Some went under. One free online image hosting website that has been rock solid for me is Imgur. And that is where I host all of the images I share.

Okay, so you upload the GIF you want to share.



FINALLY YOU SHARE IT.

I am not covering this because you know there is an Image button right up there ^^^^ and is easy to use. And this will be similar at other sites.

Just throwing this out as another option:

GIMP can load a folder (of images) as layers, then export as a GIF where each layer is a frame. It lets you set timing, looping, transparency, etc and is free.

Many thanks, very informative.
Didn't know about ezgif.com and imgur.com, always used tinypic.com to upload pics, but is getting more and more polluted by aggressive malware adds.

You didn't mention what is your preferred fps?

FPS is as high as needed to clearly show stuff. However, I put much more emphasis on file size. I don't want to have my posts pulling in 100 MB of GIF data. A thread like that could easily exceed gigabytes of data per page (say 10 to 20 posts) bogging it down and causing most people to hit the back button or close the page.

So I reduce the fps as low as I can get away with and then I do a color reduction and then a compression all to lower the file size so if include 3 gifs in a single post it will be 3 to 5 MB or less. Again if it is in isolation say a landing page at GameJolt or Steam or your own website etc sure pump up quality for gamers but in forum threads that may end up up with dozens and possibly 100+ GIFs you don't want those to be averaging 10 MB+ each.

It is also just the overall ram usage. I am sure you have visited threads at some forum that has loads of high-quality gifs and sometimes takes minutes to load even on high-speed and sometimes will crash a browser just due to the huge amount of ram space required. Probably a big hit on cell browsers more so than desktop.

Sometimes I do post one with an emphasis on higher quality for my fellow devs but those you will see make up for it by being tiny.

Exactly that's why I was wondering for the GIFs look nice and still page loads quickly.