Popular:
 Building Resilient Systems on AWS: Learn how to design and implement a resilient, highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS.

Prevent Animated GIFs from Looping

By  on  
Prevent GIF Looping

We all know animated GIFs put the "fun" in "functional." I've recently written incredible posts with regard to animated GIF images, including:

One bit of information that has eluded me is how to control the loop count of an animated GIF.  Say you have an animated GIF and you only want to limit the number of times the GIF can loop, or even prevent looping of the GIF -- it's super simple with gifsicle!

Prevent GIF Looping

gifsicle provides a --no-loopcount option when you process a GIF:

gifsicle herrera-wtf.gif --no-loopcount > herrera-wtf-once.gif

The resulting GIF plays once and then stops:

Prevent GIF Looping
Click the image above to restart it.

Loop a GIF {x} Times

Another gifsicle command line option, --loopcount, allows for you to set any number as the loop count of the image:

gifsicle jack-slow.gif --loopcount=3 > herrera-wtf-four-plays.gif

The --loopcount is set to 3, meaning the GIF actually plays 4 times (original, then 3 loops).

Why you'd want a GIF to loop at any specific amount is unknown to me, but the ability to prevent looping is certainly useful, if only to cut down on how expensive the animation is!

Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring

Recent Features

  • By
    Regular Expressions for the Rest of Us

    Sooner or later you'll run across a regular expression. With their cryptic syntax, confusing documentation and massive learning curve, most developers settle for copying and pasting them from StackOverflow and hoping they work. But what if you could decode regular expressions and harness their power? In...

  • By
    5 Awesome New Mozilla Technologies You’ve Never Heard Of

    My trip to Mozilla Summit 2013 was incredible.  I've spent so much time focusing on my project that I had lost sight of all of the great work Mozillians were putting out.  MozSummit provided the perfect reminder of how brilliant my colleagues are and how much...

Incredible Demos

Discussion

  1. Venkateshwar

    Hi David,

    I got it that we should do this using command line. But how that command line will attach the gif to the frontend?

    Can you please provide a simple example for starters like me?

    Thanks.

  2. splinterteal

    Gifsicle is such a useful tool, using it religously

  3. Teelah

    I’ve actually never need my animated gifs to not loop! But I guess its because I never knew how? Thanks for the share, perhaps I will find some use for this. Maybe!!

  4. Philip Danic

    Does this impact performance in any way, or is it just a UX thing so that we could possibly give the user more control?

  5. Loupax

    Gifs are silent movies with bad resolution and even worse compression that have taken over the world. There is a life lesson hidden there somewhere

  6. grzegorz

    Is it only me or it happens for everyone. After the first time the gif is played any subsequent refresh of the page does not even start the animation. Any suggestions for this?

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!