Tip: Use Preview for animated gifs
Preview in Leopard has limited read-only support for animated gifs. Open an animated gif in Preview and you’ll see what looks like a normal image:
You’ll see a little numbered icon up in the top-left corner of the thumbnail representing the number of frames in the animated gif.
Click this little icon to animate the single image out into a collection of images.
The animated gif support still needs refinement, though. Viewing that image in Slideshow mode shows the same first frame every time, rather than each successive frame, as you’d expect.
Still, a handy and quick way to grab a particular frame from a complicated animated gif. Nice!
It still annoys me that in Leopard they removed the “play” button from Preview. You used to be able to simply hit that button to watch animated .gifs play. Since upgrading I have changed all my gifs to open in Quicktime Player instead.
I open all gif’s in safari. I must say that for priding themselves on media technology, apple really disappoints me when I can’t view the gif’s animation in preview. However, viewing each frame is a nice tool to have sometimes.
When I open an animated .gif in Preview, it always shows the collection of images in the sidebar. Do you know how to change this behavior so it defaults to only showing the first frame?
WIlly, the default in Snow Leopard appears to have been inverted to automatically expand the animated gif by default. I don’t see a way to automatically collapse it by default.