Animated GIF images don't play in Gallery app

[FriendFX]

I have a problem that animate GIFs (e.g. the ones sent via instant messengers) don’t play; they only show the first frame.

For example, while I can see this animation in Firefox for Mobile, if I “save” and “open” it on my mobile, the Gallery app only shows the first image of the animation.

A friend with a FP2 and the (non-open) Fairphone OS 17.11.2 can see such animations just fine.

Is that a known problem of the FP Open OS (my phone currently runs 17.11.2)? Are there any known solutions?

[paulakreuzer]

It’s probably the gallery app that simply doesn’t have this function.
The gallery app here on Lineage can play gifs.

[DietmarP]

I checked on my FP Open and can confirm the gif is not played in the Gallery. Could be that gif playing relies on some Guhgel stuff but I would find that quite surprising.

[Amber]

Which “Gallery app” do you mean? For standard Google Android Google has replaced the previous nice Gallery app of Android 5.1 with a not so nice “Fotos” app in Android 6, which I have disabled and replaced by F-Droid Gallery (Galerie) app. This show animated Gif pictures like the example above.

[FriendFX]

I mean the standard Gallery app that came with the OS,

I haven’t installed any other app to view pictures. I’ll give the one from F-Droid a go, thanks for the hint @Amber .

Update:

The Gallery app on F-Droid does indeed play GIFs. Looking good, this solved it for me.

[paulakreuzer]

@Amber: @FriendFX is using FP Open amd there is no g%$\e fotos app there.

[Amber]

Hello @paulakreuzer I know but with my messsage I have tried to get closer to questions like

• initial post from FriendFX: “A friend with a FP2 and the (non-open) Fairphone OS 17.11.2 can see such animations just fine.” – while there is no “Gallery” app on standard Fairphone OS any more.
• DietmarP: “Could be that gif playing relies on some Guhgel stuff but I would find that quite surprising.”

and offer solutions.

I like that Fairphone has saved the Gallery app from Android 5.1 to Android 6, because it didn’t enforce sending data to Google. But well, it obviously cannot play animated GIFs.

[FriendFX]

@Amber

I like that Fairphone has saved the Gallery app from Android 5.1 to Android 6, because it didn’t enforce sending data to Google. But well, it obviously cannot play animated GIFs.

Interesting… I know this is a bit off-topic now, but does that mean that the “Fotos” app now used by Android 6+ (in contrast to FP Open’s or F-Droid’s Gallery apps) sends data to Google? If so, do you know what it sends?

[Stefan]

The AOSP gallery app on my FP1 with #kitkat also plays GIFs. No Google here.

[Amber]

It basically tries hard to convince you that Google Cloud Storage is the perfect place to store your media data. It does so with some default settings and some nagging.

It also categorizes your pictures “intelligently” by its content using Googles AI imaging knowledge. I assume it does image scan online to achieve best possible up-to-date results.

If you leave the default, your data is properly backed up for your convenience. If you change the setting it happened to me that after some update these settings were changed to its default again. This was too much for me.