Looping GIF plays only once in email client or browser

July 19, 2017 2:37 PM

I've created an animated GIF in Photoshop for Mac OS X that was set to loop forever. If I view it in Quick Look it loops forever. If I send it to someone in Messages it loop forever, both for me and the recipient. If I send the GIF in an email (Mail app or Gmail web mail) it plays once and doesn't loop. If I open the GIF in a browser (Safari or Chrome) it plays once and doesn't loop. Any way to fix this?

I've done a bunch of searching for the answer, but the search results tend to either be (a) for a specific app or web site I'm not using, (b) outdated and obsolete, or (c) from a site like Stack Overflow, with a solution that requires coding in javascript or hex. I am hoping there is an answer that does not require coding in javascript or hex.

Looping GIFs collected from the internet work fine, it's only my home made one that's a problem. The problem persists whether I attach the GIF in the email or if I host the GIF on Google Photos and embed it into the email.

Thanks in advance!

posted by ejs to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Can Photoshop save it as an animated PNG?
posted by XMLicious at 10:03 PM on July 19, 2017

I've actually been running into this issue on the net a lot lately. Selected gifs that loop in preview but not when viewed full size on a web page. Happens in both Safari and Firefox for Mac. It's a mystery to me.
posted by Thorzdad at 8:01 AM on July 20, 2017

Best answer: Stupid me—It turns out that I actually hadn't set the GIF to loop forever, but it took me a while to check that since Messages and Quick Look were incorrectly looping it forever, giving me bad feedback.
posted by ejs at 10:45 AM on July 24, 2017