Today, it is rare that a free program can be considered truly original. GifCam is such a program. Although many programs can create animated GIFs, GifCam simplifies the process as no other program has. The program will record any area of the desktop and save it as an animated GIF. It is a portable application that requires no installation. It is available only for Windows.
GifCam is quite easy to use. When launched, the program window appears on the desktop with the main window transparent. The transparent window is the area that will be recorded; it can be resized and relocated to your needs. Prepare your source material (start playing a YouTube video, for example), resize and relocate GifCam over the video, press ‘Rec’ to begin recording and ‘Stop’ to stop the recording. Next, save the GIF with the ‘Save’ button. A drop-down arrow on the ‘Save’ button allows you to select 5 quality levels. ‘Quantize’ produces the most realistic output, although ‘Gray Scale’ preserves more detail. Many may prefer ‘Gray Scale’ even though the file sizes are larger. ‘Monochrome’ can produce interesting results with the right source material (high contrast and little detail). ‘256 Color’ produces the classic animated GIF look, and I don’t know why anyone would use the ’20 Color’ setting. The ‘Edit button allows for trimming frames or delay time from frames – rather clunky, but it works.
– – – – The Bottom Line – – – –
An adjustment for frames per second would be nice and I occasionally noticed green artifacts in the output files, but overall, GifCam is an impressive program. I give it two thumbs up.
DUMMR.com 
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