How does a gif know to loop, and (possibly redundant follow-up) can you tell it to only loop a section?

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How does a gif know to loop, and (possibly redundant follow-up) can you tell it to only loop a section?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

A gif is just a series of images. If there is sound with it, it’s a video.

By itself, a gif doesn’t know to loop. It just display each image at the speed that it’s supposed to. Other programs (like your browser) can tell it to go back to the 1st image every time it reaches the last.

Anonymous 0 Comments

To answer your follow up question, no, you can’t loop only a selection. Once the gif is exported it is just a singular file. There’s no way to differentiate different sections of it for looping.

You could hard code/animate the looping in your graphics editor of choice before exporting it as a gif, but you would still output only a single file, so you would have to hardcode in how many times it loops. It’s not something you can change once it’s exported.