How to Stop Animated GIFs From Playing in Your Web Browser

Animated GIFs can be a fun way to spice up reactions on social media, or get a point across in an article–but they can also be annoying, and take forever to load if you have a slow connection.

If you’d rather not see them, here’s how to stop them from automatically animating.

Animated GIFs are technically images instead of videos, so click-to-play plugins and video-blocking extensions like FlashBlock won’t stop them from automatically playing.

This used to be easier:

You could just press the “Esc” key to pause animated GIFs on the current page.

But Chrome never supported this shortcut. So in order to block those GIFs from playing, you’ll need to do a little extra work. Since Chrome has no built-in setting for controlling whether animated GIFs play, you’ll have to install a browser extension to control this.

Thankfully, Google provides their own official browser extension. Named Animation Policy, this extension gives you a browser toolbar button that allows you to control whether animated GIFs play. You can disable animations entirely, or force animated GIFs to only play a single time before stopping. You’ll have to refresh the current web page after changing this setting.

Some people report that the official Google extension may not work on some web pages. If it doesn’t work reliably for you, you may want to try the Gif Jam (Animation Stopper) extension instead. It provides a toolbar button that toggles animations on and off, too. You’ll have to refresh the current page to make your setting change take effect. However, it blocks animations in a different way, so it may work where Google’s extension won’t.

Source from:How-To Geek