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

Question

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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Answer 1

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.