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!
Latest comments (21)
It's not showing in your README now
Can you show a repo that has animated gif?
Trying to make it work on markdown.
Thanks for the ScreenToGif recommendation!
ShareX is incredible for a free software. You can set it to capture a specific region of your screen as a video or GIF. You can also use it to convert videos into GIFs.
Thanks for the tip! Just bought Gifox and it's fantastic!
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 😊once you have the GIF image. I create issue on github, then drag and drop the file in textarea. Cope the MD code, cancel the issue.
Take the code line to README :)
I know I'm late to this, but you should always create the issue and then close it. Otherwise, GitHub/Microsoft might, in the future, delete images that use this hack to basically turn GitHub into an upload site. How many people have started the process of opening an issue, uploaded an image, and then cancelled because they figured out the problem themselves or are abusing the CDN this way? Probably way more than have used this hack for repos. Those images occupy space on a drive somewhere and someone is going to want to reclaim that wasted storage space after a while.
with your help i have added demo gif for my project in github. thank you.
github.com/ayyappag10/shopping-cart
thanks
I have been using LICEcap for years (on OSX), but the Window Selection feature in Gitfox looks pretty rad. Thanks for sharing!