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I wonder if there is a way to prevent a browser from actually animating an animated gif, loaded in a <img> tag. I just want it to display the first frame of the gif and don't play the animation.

I already fear that this isn't possible and I have to extract the first frame and render it to a canvas.

Mark Rotteveel
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Christian Engel
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  • Why do you need a canvas for that? – PeeHaa Nov 14 '13 at 22:23
  • Because the canvas tag would be the only way to render the first frame of the animated gif. – Christian Engel Nov 14 '13 at 22:25
  • Is it possible to do this on the server side? PHP's GD module will only load the first frame of a GIF by default, for example – Bojangles Nov 14 '13 at 22:28
  • Yup would be possible, but I'd like to apply the "effect" when the image has been added to a single page app directly after a drag/drop operation; before anything gets uploaded to the server. – Christian Engel Nov 14 '13 at 22:30
  • It seems there are some weird possibilities to control GIFs through JavaScript. Have a look at the answers on http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4645274/extracting-single-frames-from-animgif-to-canvas – jplatte Nov 14 '13 at 22:46
  • You can read binary data with javascript. In theory that means you could manipulate the data say to remove all frames but the first one. But I've not seen it done to the extent that would be required. – Wayne Nov 14 '13 at 23:19
  • Actually it may have been done see jsgif... http://slbkbs.org/jsgif/ – Wayne Nov 14 '13 at 23:25

2 Answers2

2

This is kinda an expensive solution, but if you reset image SRC on a very short setInterval it appears as static e.g:

setInterval(function() {
       document.getElementById('img1').src = document.getElementById('img1').src
},1)

Demo: http://jsfiddle.net/MEaWP/6/

Yuriy Galanter
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  • This seems way too expensive to be a solution. What's the goal behind needing the first frame of the GIF? There's more than likely a better solution than repeatedly reseting the element's src – Mike Carpenter Sep 27 '18 at 22:29
  • I think this is better than no solution at all! An alternative would probably be: [Extracting single frames from an animated GIF to canvas](https://stackoverflow.com/q/4645274/1066234) – Avatar Nov 13 '22 at 13:28
  • But wait, I just see now that this indeed, runs every 1 ms and adds the image source. So yes, too expensive definitely. I thought it would be a `setTimeout()` but it is constantly running. – Avatar Nov 13 '22 at 13:37
0

Maybe this is too simple an answer for you but you could just open the animated GIF in a image editing program of your choice, i.e. Adobe Photoshop or any other free one, and then just save out the GIF without the animation.

Then re-upload the new GIF (without the animation) to wherever you are serving your images from.

If you do use Photoshop you can simply open the file.GIF and go to Window>Animation in the Menu. This will display all the frames in the animated GIF in a new dialog box.

Just delete all the frames and Save As. Just don't overwrite the original with the animation if you will still need that later.

Terri Swiatek
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    Its not written clearly in my initial question but the solution should be working in-browser, since I don't control the gif images. Users do upload them. – Christian Engel Jan 11 '14 at 22:36