Disabling GIF animation in HTML

Question

Is there any way, in HTML, to include an animated GIF in an <img> tag, but automatically tell the GIF to not animate? I realize that the user can stop animation by pressing ESC or clicking Stop, but I want the GIFs not to animate at all.

I only want to do this on one specific page, and making separate non-animated versions of the (1500+) GIFs is not feasible. I simply want the GIFs to not animate.

Answer 1

Not with plain HTML but using PHP with imagecreatefromgif might help you

Answer 2

You could use window.stop() in javascript, which should be the equivalent of pressing ESC/clicking stop. However, I'm pretty sure it won't work in all browsers (i.e. IE).

Answer 3

I don't think calling window.stop() will be a good solution. This would need to be called for every image that is loaded to prevent it from running half way through and stopping. The best solution is to use a library such as GD to create images featuring just the first frame of the animated GIF.