I have my GitHub link on my resume and if I'm lucky, potential employers might check out my apps on GitHub. However, I know they're busy and won't have much time to spend so I wanted to make it easy for them and others visiting my repo and show the app in action in the README.md file that's displayed when you go to a repository.
Embedding a video in a GitHub README would be a dream come true, but as I found out, it's not possible--you'd have to link to the video instead. You can, however put an animated GIF in a README file and that's what I've done with many of my projects.
Here's one for my Farmer's Market Finder app:
Unfortunately, animated GIFs can't normally be as long as videos, but you can use them to quickly show off some core functionality of your app.
How to Create an Animated GIF?
Here are a couple apps you can use to create animated GIF screen recordings.
Windows
I like to use ScreenToGif which is a free open source app for Windows 7 or later. The software is intuitive to use for simply creating an animated GIF of an area you choose on your screen and they also have a User Guide.
Mac
I use Gifox when creating animated GIFs of my screen on the Mac. It sits up in my menu bar and is easy to use. I use the paid version because GIFs created with the free version are limited to 10 seconds and have a watermark.
Other
I know I've left out options for other operating systems and devices, but I only wanted to recommend the ones I've tried myself. Please comment below if you can recommend other apps for taking animated GIF screen recordings.
Adding the Animated GIF to your README
Once you've created the animated GIF, you can embed it in your README.md file like you would a regular image.
I usually create a 'Demo' Heading in my README under the description of the app and put the animated GIF under the Demo heading along with a link to a demo of the site online.
If you don't have a good place to host images, you could do what I have done and create a demo (or better named) folder in your GitHub repository and upload the GIF there, then link to it in the README.
Example:
Note: The alt text is what goes between the square brackets and then the URL to the GIF goes between the parentheses. If the image is in your GitHub repository, you can use a relative link like I did in the example.
Thanks for reading my first post!
Top comments (21)
For Linux, you can use Peek.
I use screencastify plugin for chrome to record product workflows, bugs etc...
In Free tire it gives you 50 recordings per month with max 10 min. recording per session. you can download saved videos from Google drive or export it as gifs.
i have been using it for some time and never needed to upgrade to paid plan.
Thanks Pritesh, screencastify looks good. I'll definitely give it a try!
While it is true you have 50 free recordings a month. You must pay $24 a year to make animated gifs. However, it's money well worth it to make quality README files.
I use GIPHY Capture on Mac. While the purpose is to upload gifs to giphy, I just save them locally after capturing my screen. I also save the gif in the repo itself rather than try to keep things hosted in one place. If the app changes, then I can just update
demo.gifwhile I'm in there and it's all in one commit.Fantastic post! I just wrote a post on adding large GIFs to the
README.md, expanding on what you discuss at the end regarding adding the GIF into the repo. Thanks for writing this Kelli 😊with your help i have added demo gif for my project in github. thank you.
github.com/ayyappag10/shopping-cart
Might be a good idea in general to host such media externally, I suppose most important for long-term projects. I've tried this out recently, much smaller imprint to update a url path than for a repo to contain a media file it does not need.
But this is a good idea! I've tried including demos as a frontend model in a few repos as a directory, but a GIF gives that immediate impression.
thanks
That's pretty clever! Good tip.
Check getkap.co super simple, grat tool
This is very helpful, thank you!