Record the click path. Fifteen seconds, not a movie
“Click here, then the gear, then…” — by the third clause they have already opened the wrong panel.
Say the path with clicks. A hotkey or the tray starts GIF recording. Circle the window. Stop. The editor opens. Copy into chat. Free is 15 seconds with an icon watermark. Pro removes the cap and the watermark. This is not a video suite: no project timeline, no voice track, no cloud render.
Stills, arrows, OCR live in Capture, annotate, OCR. This post is only the moving path. If you already have an annotated still, do not record motion as decoration. Motion is for order. A frame is for a state.
Fifteen seconds is enough for three or four clicks. A permission dialog, a settings row, the button that does nothing — they fit. A longer path becomes two clips, or a real recorder. Do not stitch three free recordings into a fake feature.
GIF selection: icon bar for FPS / cursor / click rings. Recording shows time and frames. Free: 15s + watermark; Pro unlimited, no watermark.
One repro
Capture selection and annotation bar (same icons as the app). Arrow is active; the secret is mosaicked. OCR: 10/day Free. Scrolling capture: 3/day Free.
- In Settings → Shortcuts, bind start / stop GIF, or use the tray. Stop is often
Ctrl+Shift+G; check the Settings page on your machine. Cursor in frame and frame rate live under Settings → Capture. - Circle the window you are demonstrating. The start control does not hide first. Free stops at 15 seconds.
- You land in the capture / GIF editor (not the snippet editor). Trim the timeline, drop frames. Copy, or export GIF / APNG. MP4 needs ffmpeg on this machine. All of that stays local. See GIF.
Three jobs: show a coworker “I click and nothing happens,” drop a short action into a doc, replace five sequential stills in chat. Past “make the path obvious,” use a real recorder. Do not cut a keynote here.
The free watermark does not turn off. Public tutorials, store pages, customer docs: Pro, or live with the mark. Do not file the watermark as a defect.
A GIF here is closer to a gesture than to a film. You are not lighting a scene. You are showing the order of clicks that a paragraph keeps getting wrong. If the path is longer than a breath, write the leftover steps; do not stitch three free recordings into a fake feature.
When you already have a still in the other article’s editor, do not reopen this loop to “add motion” for decoration. Motion is for order. A single annotated frame is for a state. Mixing the two because both buttons sit on the tray is how you spend an afternoon in the wrong tool.
Do not
- Do not treat this as a screencast suite. No storyboard, no caption track.
- Do not treat it as a cloud album. The file stays on this computer until you copy or save.
- Do not ship a free-tier file to customers and then complain about the watermark. The boundary is 15 seconds and the mark.
- Do not look here for scrolling capture or OCR. That is the stills post.
Next: record the button path you cannot explain, paste it into the ticket, and see if they still need a paragraph.