CODEWITHSUNDEEP
animationfirefox
Michael Rolle
Michael Rolle

Reputation: 51

Is there a way to pause or control an animated gif in my browser?

I'm in Firefox and I'm looking at a page which has several how-to sections. Each of these has an animated git showing a user following the instructions. The animation goes by too fast for me to be useful. I just want a way to pause the animation so that I can zoom in and see the details better. Then resume the animation.

I tried clicking on the GIF, and I get just the GIF, but it still is animated and I can't control it.

What I'd like is some way to have FF open the image so that I can pause and resume the image. Some reliable FF extension or plug-inAn would be best. An item in the context menu would be nice (using about:config). Or an item in the Settings/Applications list for images in general, or .gif files in particular (also using about:config). Or some application where I can open the app and drag the image from FF into the open app's window.

What I've tried is:

  1. Changing how FF processes the click on the image. Its Settings does not show anything related to images in the Applications section. I can't find a way to configure FF to add more file types to this section. Anybody know how to do this?

  2. I can view the image in WMP (Windows Media Player), but this is a clumsy process. First, I have to save the image somewhere, then I have to open the folder where I saved it, then do an Open With.... Then since WMP isn't on the list of apps, I have to do Select Another App, and scroll down to WMP and select that. I don't want to make this the default for all GIF files, so I have to do this for each animated GIF. Once I've done this, WMP comes up and I can do what I want.

  3. I tried a drag and drop from my image in FF to an open WMP window, but there's no response there.

  4. I tried RealPlayer. I can do an Open With and RealPlayer is on the list of apps. But RealPlayer shows the image without animating it. RealPlayer also has an Open command and I paste in the URL of the image, but it's the same result.

  5. I loaded the Toggle Animated Gif extension for FF. This is not satisfactory because I can either run the animation or show the GIF without any animation. I want to be able to freeze the animation in the middle of it.

Upvotes: 4

Views: 7302

Answers (2)

Kamal
Kamal

Reputation: 415

This JavaScript bookmarklet is the easiest solution I could find: https://slbkbs.org/jsgif/ I noticed the example on that page has the controls too far from the gif and they disappear when you move the mouse cursor outside the gif (simple click on the gif still works to pause), but if you click the bookmarklet on a page with only the gif, it works flawlessly. To create the bookmarklet, of course just drag the big "jsgif" at the centre of the page (yellow box) to the bookmark bar, or right-click it and add to bookmarks.

Upvotes: 0

Peter Kehl
Peter Kehl

Reputation: 87

Same difficulty here. Unfortunately, there's no such Firefox extension for now. The closest one is https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/gifpuase. It allows to pause a GIT, but not to resume - so not enough for you.

While I also prefer Firefox, but for this I suggest Chrome and Gif Scrubber: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gif-scrubber/gbdacbnhlfdlllckelpdkgeklfjfgcmp. Not immediate, but powerful.

Upvotes: 2

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