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Why can't Quick Look (spacebar) nor Preview (app) view animated gif?

iSamurai

iSamurai

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Nov 9, 2007
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^^ that's the question... is there a reason to this? Will apple eventually make it "playable"?

I think this applies to Vista's image viewer as well, but not XP.

For now it's a matter of viewing the gif in a browser :p
 
iSamurai said:
^^ that's the question... is there a reason to this? Will apple eventually make it "playable"?

I think this applies to Vista's image viewer as well, but not XP.

For now it's a matter of viewing the gif in a browser :p
Click to expand...

I was just thinking of that about a minute ago. I know it opens all the frames of the gif up, but theres no way to play them.
 
It doesn't do that. You can open your animated gif in Safari, or download Xee.

I don't like Xee, personally...
 
Sorry to bump this but I want to answer that question.

Yes, I have a lot of animated GIF's on my computer. Many in my website's local copy. I think it's silly that we have to open them in a browser just to watch them play.

Quicklook can display WebKit views. (As seen in a plugin that shows the contents of a ZIP file. It's just HTML pages.) Why hasn't someone created a simple plugin that would place the GIF in a simple HTML page and preview that in the QuickLook window? It's not that hard. I'd do it myself if I could.

I mean we have one for viewing FLV's using Perian. It even makes thumbnails of the files in the Finder.

If I knew a speck of code I'd create the plugin myself. It'd be so simple I bet.
 
whilst the iphone is still too crap to be able to show animated flash files people are forced to create animated gifs still :)
 
Because Apple thinks no one uses GIFs, just like they say no one uses Flash and that no one uses FireWire 400. Gifs still appear here and there, and they're honestly the simplest way of displaying a small, simple animation like a "loading" spinning icon or something. Safari is already horribly bad at playing GIFs and Preview and Quick Look just don't even try to play them. If you ask me, it's sad that something as simple as a GIF plays worse today than 10 years ago! Yes there are less GIFs but GIFs are not gone. Many people have stupid GIFs in their forum signatures and sometimes you just find it funny and want to copy it to your computer and keep it. At a time like that you don't really care about video codecs and modern formats. You just want the animation. While Windows has absolutely no problem playing a GIF whatsoever, on a Mac, you just can't do it properly. Safari takes like 10 minutes and 3 reloads to play a freaking GIF! You can't just pretend they don't exist, they're still part of the web!
 
<bump>

Lion's QuickLook natively supports the "playback" of animated GIFs, by the way.

Strangely enough, Lion's Preview.app does not. You can look at every frame individually/manually, but there's no "play" button there.



And baryon? Not sure what your rant is all about, otherwise Apple wouldn't have added this support into their latest OS. As far as Firewire 400 goes? You can buy a Firewire 800-400 cable for like $3 these days. Problem solved. Just because Apple started supporting USB 2.0 that doesn't mean they think "no one uses USB 1.0 either." It's called backwards compatibility and also, it's called progress.
 
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