🎬 GIF Scroll Animation

Capture any webpage as a beautiful, smooth, scrolling animated GIF — in seconds.

📖 Overview

GIF Scroll Animation is a powerful Apify Actor that launches a real Chromium browser, navigates to your URL, scrolls the full page from top to bottom, and saves every frame as a looping animated GIF. Use it to create website previews, onboarding demos, portfolio showcases, and social media content.

Supports bulk URL input, custom viewport sizing, frame rate control, cookie banner dismissal, click interactions, and gifsicle-powered compression.

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✨ Why Choose This Actor?

Feature	This Actor
🖥️ Real browser rendering	✅ Playwright + Chromium
📦 Bulk URL input	✅ Unlimited URLs
🗜️ Compression	✅ Lossy + Lossless via gifsicle
🍪 Cookie handling	✅ Auto-dismiss + custom selector
🔀 Proxy fallback	✅ Direct → Datacenter → Residential
💾 Live output	✅ Per-URL results saved immediately
🖼️ GIF preview in Console	✅ Image column in output table

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🎯 Key Features

• 📸 Real browser screenshots — renders JavaScript, CSS animations, lazy-loaded images
• 🌐 Bulk URL input — capture dozens of pages in one run
• 📐 Custom viewport — set width & height for perfect canvas sizing
• 🎞️ Adjustable FPS — 1–30 frames per second
• ⬇️ Full-page scroll — configurable step size and max frame cap
• 🖱️ Click interactions — click any CSS selector and record the result
• 🍪 Cookie handling — auto-dismiss common consent dialogs or remove by selector
• 🗜️ Dual compression — optional lossy (gifsicle -O3 --lossy=80) and lossless variants
• 🔀 Proxy fallback — direct → datacenter → residential, auto-triggered on blocks
• 🐢 Animation slow-down — capture CSS animations at 10% speed for clarity
• 💾 Live KVS upload — GIFs stored in the run's Key-Value Store, accessible via URL

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📥 Input

{
  "urls": [
    { "url": "https://crawlee.dev/" },
    { "url": "https://apify.com" }
  ],
  "viewportWidth": 1366,
  "viewportHeight": 768,
  "frameRate": 7,
  "scrollDown": true,
  "scrollPercentage": 10,
  "recordingTimeBeforeAction": 1000,
  "clickSelector": "",
  "recordingTimeAfterClick": 1000,
  "waitToLoadPage": 0,
  "cookieWindowSelector": "",
  "autoDismissCookies": true,
  "slowDownAnimations": false,
  "lossyCompression": true,
  "losslessCompression": false,
  "maxFrames": 600,
  "pageLoadTimeout": 90,
  "retries": 2,
  "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": false }
}

Field	Type	Default	Description
urls	array	required	URLs to capture
viewportWidth	integer	1366	Browser width (px)
viewportHeight	integer	768	Browser height (px)
frameRate	integer	7	Output GIF frames per second
scrollDown	boolean	true	Scroll page top-to-bottom
scrollPercentage	integer	10	Scroll step as % of viewport height
recordingTimeBeforeAction	integer	1000	Hold first frame (ms)
clickSelector	string	""	CSS selector to click (optional)
recordingTimeAfterClick	integer	1000	Record duration after click (ms)
waitToLoadPage	integer	0	Extra wait after page load (ms)
cookieWindowSelector	string	""	CSS selector of cookie banner to remove
autoDismissCookies	boolean	true	Auto-click cookie accept buttons
slowDownAnimations	boolean	false	Slow animations to 10% speed
lossyCompression	boolean	true	Generate lossy-compressed variant
losslessCompression	boolean	false	Generate lossless-compressed variant
maxFrames	integer	600	Cap on total scroll frames
pageLoadTimeout	integer	90	Page load timeout in seconds
retries	integer	2	Retry attempts per URL
proxyConfiguration	object	no proxy	Apify proxy settings

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📤 Output

Each captured GIF is uploaded to the run's Key-Value Store and a dataset row is pushed immediately. If both original and compressed variants are requested, each gets its own dataset row.

{
  "url": "https://crawlee.dev/",
  "site_name": "crawlee.dev",
  "gif_type": "original",
  "gif_key": "crawlee.dev-scroll_original",
  "gif_url": "https://api.apify.com/v2/key-value-stores/<id>/records/crawlee.dev-scroll_original",
  "frame_count": 42,
  "file_size_bytes": 1215463,
  "file_size_human": "1.2 MB",
  "viewport": "1366x768",
  "frame_rate": 7,
  "success": true,
  "error_message": null,
  "captured_at": "2026-05-21T14:00:00+00:00"
}

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🚀 How to Use (Apify Console)

1. Go to console.apify.com → Actors
2. Search for GIF Scroll Animation and open it
3. Add your URLs in the Website URLs field
4. Adjust viewport, FPS, and compression settings as needed
5. Click Start
6. Watch the real-time logs — you'll see frames captured as they happen
7. Open the Output tab to see your GIF table with image previews
8. Click any GIF URL to download or preview

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🤖 Use via API

curl -X POST \
  "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/YOUR_ACTOR_ID/runs?token=YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "urls": [{"url": "https://crawlee.dev/"}],
    "frameRate": 7,
    "lossyCompression": true
  }'

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🔀 Proxy Behavior

Scenario	Behavior
Default	Direct request (no proxy)
Target blocks direct	Auto-fallback to Apify Datacenter proxy
Datacenter blocked	Auto-fallback to Residential proxy
Residential blocked	Retry up to 3 times with residential
Fallback triggered	All subsequent requests use the fallback proxy

All proxy transitions are logged in real time.

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💰 Pricing

This actor uses the Pay per usage model — you pay only for the Apify platform compute and proxy costs. No additional Store charges.

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❓ Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What format are the output GIFs in? A: Standard animated GIF. Original, lossy-compressed, and lossless-compressed variants are available.

Q: Why is my GIF blank or only one frame? A: Check if the page uses authentication or a full-screen overlay. Try setting waitToLoadPage to 2000–5000 ms.

Q: How do I make a smaller GIF? A: Enable lossyCompression, reduce frameRate to 5, or increase scrollPercentage to 15–20.

Q: Can it handle infinite-scroll pages? A: Yes, set maxFrames to cap the recording. Default is 600 frames.

Q: What viewport sizes work best? A: 1366×768 is a common laptop screen. Use 1920×1080 for full HD. Smaller viewports (1024×576) produce smaller files.

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🛠️ Support and Feedback

Found a bug or have a feature request? Open an issue or contact the author through the Apify platform.