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How do I view GIFs?

JMG

JMG

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
May 4, 2006
554
2
When I open a GIF in PREVIEW it only shows me the first frame. The drawer will show me all the frames, but it won't "play" the animation. Anyone else have this problem? In PREVIEW HELP it says:

Viewing animated GIFs
An animated GIF is a graphic file that shows a short animation. Preview lets you look at each frame in the animation as an individual still image.

Open the animated GIF file in Preview.
If the window's drawer isn't already visible, choose View > Drawer.
The drawer contains a thumbnail image for the animated GIF. The number of frames in the animation appears in the lower-right corner.

Click the triangle beside the thumbnail image.
Preview shows all the frames in the animated GIF. When you click a frame, the animation stops and Preview displays that frame.


but there is NO animation?!
 
If you want to see your GIF animated try opening it in a browser window.

Right click the File and choose >open with >Safari.
 
If PREVIEW says it can show animated gifs (and animate them) then why doesn't it?
 
JMG said:
If PREVIEW says it can show animated gifs (and animate them) then why doesn't it?
Click to expand...

no preview doesn't say that in the help, you quoted already that it says "Preview lets you look at each frame in the animation as an individual still image."

just drag the gif into safari.
 
Benjamin said:
no preview doesn't say that in the help, you quoted already that it says "Preview lets you look at each frame in the animation as an individual still image."
Click to expand...

Yes, but the Preview help also says "When you click a frame, the animation stops..." which implies it was running at some point, yes? :confused:
 
Preview used to allow you to view the animations in gif files, but for some reason this functionality was removed a while back. Perhaps they never got round to updating the help file.
 
dejo said:
Yes, but the Preview help also says "When you click a frame, the animation stops..." which implies it was running at some point, yes? :confused:
Click to expand...

not really, just sounds like redundancy to the first part of it, "Preview shows all the frames in the animated GIF." it was never moving in the first place when you open it.
 
I just read it, and I'm pretty sure that's a mistake--those help files sadly get outdated on occasion, which they really shouldn't, especially for such a basic app. Either that, or Apple broke the animation feature at some point and never bothered to fix it (not heavily used, I would imagine).

Anyway, it's not as smooth, but just drop it on QT player.
 
Very similar to what's in the Preview Help, here's a very similar Apple article. Supposedly this is for Preview 3.0.1. The first sentence is slightly different and says that it should show the animation. I have no idea why they removed the functionality (we're currently on version 3.0.6).
 
WildCowboy said:
Very similar to what's in the Preview Help, here's a very similar Apple article. Supposedly this is for Preview 3.0.1. The first sentence is slightly different and says that it should show the animation. I have no idea why they removed the functionality (we're currently on version 3.0.6).
Click to expand...
Ok, that explains it. When they removed the functionality, they obviously updated the overview and step 1 to remove the refernece to actually playing the animation (the current overview is clear that it doesn't play)... but they forgot to change step 3. So it got left with the referene to stopping the animation.

Understandable oversight, but they aught to fix it. Well, really they aught to re-enable the feature that let it play the animation, but if they're not going to they should fix the help file.
 
they should just reimplement the gif animation. It's pretty damn basic this is 2006, no reason to regress to not being able to display animation.
 
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