Make animated GIFs easier to control (pause/play/select) (Community Wishlist/W333)
Several Wikipedia articles use GIF animations to convey important information about a topic. And users often wish to stop the GIF at one particular point, to explore it. Unfortunately, currently the GIF animations only play in a loop, and it is not possible to view that point unless the GIF make a full loop, making it difficult and unintuitive for the user to explore the information being conveyed in the GIF.
For example: File:United States evolution fast.gif shows the entire territorial evolution of US. Let's say someone wants to review the things happening in 1861 they would need to wait until the animations makes a complete loop, which unnecessarily wastes the viewer's time. Other examples where one might want to pause the animation (or come back to a point like they do in a video) File:South korea population pyramid 1960-2020.gif, File:Municipales 1983 - 2008 à Paris.gif.
Update from WMF: We are archiving this wish. While improving gif support in MultiMediaViewer is an interesting idea, there is no team officially maintaining it right now, and we believe there are higher-priority improvements for MMV. Additionally, there are potential workarounds via browser extensions, or a user script or gadget could be created. For example: this Chrome/Firefox extension and this gif-decoder in JS.
Unassigned
Readers, Users