[REQUEST] Button to record whole active screen

[mrleblanc101]

Hi, Currently, we have 2 tools. 1) Capture whole window or 2) Free area selection. If i want to record the whole screen, I have to select the "Free area selection" tool and drag it across the whole screen. It would be nice to add a 3rd option to quickly record the whole active display (the one on which Gifox menu was triggered). This would mimic macOS native screenshot app.

[iby]

I believe this also has been mentioned before. The problem with this is the GIF format itself – it's very old often suboptimal for the web (compared to modern video compression & formats) and not meant for large and interaction-heavy animations – all that leads to huge (often 100+ MB) GIFs that shouldn't be published or used out of respect for users.

We know that many users who aren't very familiar with GIF format specifics try to use it as a direct alternative to video capturing and get upset with their first results. For that reason we don't want to "promote" full screen capturing, because the next question you'd have is why my GIF takes half of my hard drive… 😅

But that, of course, is not always the case. You can easily end up with an animated full screen capture that will be only 200 KB, it always depends. You might be interested in checking out this and this articles.

That all said, you can also use shortcut to quickly select the whole screen, Cmd A by default when the free area selection mode is active.

[mrleblanc101]

Maybe you could add the button but disabled by default with a preference to enable it. You could put a warning text under the checkbox.

[iby]

That's an interesting suggestion, but I feel that it would clutter the UI and [the need to enable the button] confuse many users. I'd be happy to consider adding a more prominent way of recording a whole screen if I knew some good use cases for that.

The big part of GIF is about quickly sharing and showing animated graphics. Large-resolution graphics in most cases would result in massive file sizes making it impossible to quickly share and show. But, like I said, that's not always the case and there are exceptions.

An interesting idea would be to add some analytics about selection to screen size ratio… 🤔 I want to understand this issue better, if you have any suggestions, please share.

[mrleblanc101]

Microsoft Teams handle video very poorly. So we use GIF to have inline preview in the conversation. Most of the time the full screen capture is less than 10s and at half resolution so the file are not that big ~50-70Mb

[iby]

Imo, any GIF over 10 MB is huge by definition. Twitter, for example, won't allow uploading anything over 10 MB, afair. Converting a massive GIF to a video would often save 80-95% in file size – simply because video codecs use significantly more efficient compression.

The real problem with GIFs, especially large ones, is the playback – GIF playback is not GPU-optimized and CPU goes crazy even with average graphic sizes, unless you're on the latest Apple Silicon and simply not noticing it (it still goes crazy). Again, each situation is individual and what doesn't work for others may very well work for you. My recommendation is to use shortcuts – Shift Cmd 6 + Cmd A + Space and you're recording the full screen… into a huge GIF 😅

[mrleblanc101]

As I said, Teams doesn't allow inline preview of video. I've always done this even on my 2015 Intel without issue. Yes a comparable video will be smaller, but it doesn't mean the GIF is huge. 50-70Mb is perfectly fine. We are not in 2010 anymore. In the end it should be up to the User. You already have downscaling and compression option. My GIF are set the 0.5x downscale.

[iby]

In the end it should be up to the User. 💯 that I can't argue about.

Let's leave this open and I will come back to this in the upcoming UI/UX review. Maybe some one will have a better idea about how to make integrate it.