How to pause GIF animation at specific frame

Question

Is there any kind of GIF/Image viewer, which is able to pause GIF animation at a specific frame or on mouse click?

I tried using 'Image Viewer', but it seems there is no way to stop the GIF animation.

Here is an example which I would like to pause:

Solution 1

The simplest way to do it is play your gif animation in mplayer

Open your gif file in mplayer using following command

  mplayer -loop 0  -speed 0.2 your_gif

Here

-loop 0 means it will run your gif image untill you are not closing it and
-speed 0.2 means it will decrease the animation speed to 20%.

You can pause your animation by pressing the Space button .
mplayer will also show the frame information of your running gif in terminal.

Solution 2

Although mplayer is indeed a simple way just to pause GIF animation and perhaps make a screenshot of a particular frame, it seems thas mplayer does not allow to navigate between frames. A tool gifview (provided by gifsicle package in Ubuntu) does a great job to provide fine-grain control over gif viewing. See the (very short) manpage for gifview for corresponding shortcuts.

Make sure you disable the optimized mode with u. Otherwise, only diffs between frames will be shown and one can have an impression that the tool does not work properly.

Solution 3

I guess you want to pause it to grab a specific frame and save it as a stand-alone image.

Open it with the gimp, it will load each frame as a separate layer. You can then delete or make invisible all the frames/layers except for the one you want, and export the image in any format supported by gimp.

Solution 4

You can break the gif into images, and browse them with the speed you want:

convert input.gif output%05d.png

Solution 5

mpv is very good at viewing gif files. It shows the similar slider as shown while palying videos and can easily move forward/backward and can stop at any frame.

View more solutions

Comments

[niekas]

Actually, I don't need the image file, I just want to pause the animation for several seconds to write down the coordinates. I have loads of GIF files with spinning figures, so I prefer not use GIMP. +1 for partially solved problem.

[niekas]

Yup, it works, but there is latency. When I press space, 2-3 frames changes before stopping. Any idea how to solve it?

[g_p]

Adjust the -speed parameter according to your need. Because for me -speed 0.5 is playing your gif file with good speed without any latency.

[Epskampie]

Exactly what i needed, to view gifs frame by frame. Thanks!

[max pleaner]

and ... spacebar does nothing. why is this so difficult?

[Dmitry Koroliov]

what is %05d ? I wrote it and nothing special happened, this just became a part of a filename for each part, like foo%05-116.png

[Adobe]

@user907860: it works as filename template on my box (ImageMagick 6.9.7-4 Q16 x86_64 20170114). Maybe you forgot the d? Like using foo%05.png instead of foo%05d.png?

[s.ouchene]

I don't really see the point of using the optimized mode by default.