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
    5 Ways that CSS and JavaScript Interact That You May Not Know About

    CSS and JavaScript:  the lines seemingly get blurred by each browser release.  They have always done a very different job but in the end they are both front-end technologies so they need do need to work closely.  We have our .js files and our .css, but...

  • By
    Serving Fonts from CDN

    For maximum performance, we all know we must put our assets on CDN (another domain).  Along with those assets are custom web fonts.  Unfortunately custom web fonts via CDN (or any cross-domain font request) don't work in Firefox or Internet Explorer (correctly so, by spec) though...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Create Twitter-Style Dropdowns Using jQuery

    Twitter does some great stuff with JavaScript. What I really appreciate about what they do is that there aren't any epic JS functionalities -- they're all simple touches. One of those simple touches is the "Login" dropdown on their homepage. I've taken...

  • By
    prefers-color-scheme: CSS Media Query

    One device and app feature I've come to appreciate is the ability to change between light and dark modes. If you've ever done late night coding or reading, you know how amazing a dark theme can be for preventing eye strain and the headaches that result.

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!