A GIF that moved yesterday and sits still today is one of the most common small puzzles on a computer. People run into it in PowerPoint, in email, on Discord and Instagram, and right after saving a GIF from the web or resizing it. The good news: there are only a handful of causes, and you can tell them apart in a minute. Either the file is no longer an animation, it is set to play once and then stop, or the app showing it is not playing it.
The quick check
Drag the GIF into an empty Chrome, Edge or Firefox tab. Browsers play every animated GIF. What you see tells you where to look:
| In the browser tab it… | So the problem is | Go to |
|---|---|---|
| Doesn’t move at all | The file: it is a still, or not a GIF | Causes 1 and 2 |
| Plays once or twice, then freezes | The loop setting inside the file | Cause 3 |
| Plays and keeps looping | The app you are putting it in | Causes 4 to 6 |
1. It isn’t the animated file
GIF sites keep several versions of every upload and show you whichever loads fastest. We downloaded one Giphy upload
and found four files behind it: giphy.gif, the real animation with 32 frames;
giphy_s.gif, a single still frame that still ends in .gif; 200w.webp, a
14-frame animated WebP; and giphy.mp4, a video. Save the wrong one and you get a still that looks like a GIF,
or an animation in a format your app does not play as one.
- Check the frames. Drop the file on Resize GIF or Crop GIF; both show how many frames the file has before you change anything. One frame means it is a still, and no setting will make it move. Go back and save the animated version.
- If it saved as .webp, turn it into a real GIF with WebP to GIF. Renaming the file to .gif does not convert it; the app still sees WebP inside.
- If it saved as .mp4, it is a video. Where videos are accepted, use it as it is; otherwise make a GIF from it with Video to GIF.
2. An editor saved only the first frame
An image editor or online resizer that opens a GIF as a single picture gives you back only the first frame: crop, resize or rotate it, save, and the result is a still, sometimes still named .gif. Browser-based tools are especially prone to this, because the browser’s drawing surface cannot even write a GIF: when we asked Chrome 156 for one, it handed back a PNG instead. Our own Resize Image tool works that way and turns a GIF into a still JPG, which is fine for photos and wrong for animations.
The fix is to edit the GIF frame by frame. Resize GIF and Crop GIF work inside the GIF file, keep every frame and its timing, and show the frame count and loop length of the result, read back from the new file. If you already overwrote the original, the frames are gone; start again from the source.
3. It plays once, then stops
Whether a GIF repeats is a setting stored in the file, not something the viewer decides. A GIF without that setting plays through once and then stays on its last frame. We made three copies of the same four-frame GIF (a quarter second per frame) and watched them in Chrome 156:
| Loop setting in the file | What Chrome did |
|---|---|
| Loop forever | Kept playing for the whole five seconds we watched |
| Loop count 1 | Played twice, then stayed on the last frame from 1.8 seconds on |
| No loop setting at all | Played once, then stayed on the last frame from 0.73 seconds on |
Note the middle row: a loop count of 1 means “repeat once”, so the GIF plays two times. A GIF that stops on a frame that is not the first one, or stops when you reload the page and then plays again, almost always has one of the bottom two settings. Export it again from the app that made it with looping set to Forever (in Photoshop: Export → Save for Web, Looping Options → Forever). Resizing, cropping or compressing it on this site keeps whatever loop setting the GIF already has.
Sometimes the stop is deliberate. On websites, the accessibility guideline WCAG 2.2.2 asks that anything moving on its own for more than five seconds can be paused, and one technique the W3C lists for it (G152) is exactly a GIF whose loops add up to five seconds or less. If a GIF on a university or government site plays a few times and stops, leave it that way.
4. PowerPoint only plays GIFs in Slide Show
In the normal editing view a GIF may sit still; that is expected. Microsoft’s help page says to play the animation from the Slide Show tab (on a Mac, Slide Show → Play from Current Slide). It also states that PowerPoint for the web can’t play animated GIFs, even in Slide Show, so a deck that animates on your laptop can freeze when opened in a browser. Present from the desktop PowerPoint app when the slide depends on the animation.
5. Outlook and Windows have animations turned off
According to Microsoft, Outlook plays animated GIFs by default, and showing only the first frame means animations are disabled. In current Outlook for Microsoft 365 that follows a Windows setting: on Windows 11, open Settings → Accessibility → Visual effects and turn Animation effects on (on Windows 10, search Start for “Show animations”). Older Outlook versions have their own switch under File → Options → Advanced → Play animated GIFs. Your recipients’ settings apply on their screens, so a GIF you send can still arrive frozen for some people; put the important part in the first frame.
Firefox has a similar hidden switch: if every GIF on every site stays still, type about:config in the
address bar and check that image.animation_mode is set to normal.
6. The app doesn’t animate GIFs there
- Discord profile picture: Discord’s Help Center lists an animated avatar as a Nitro perk. Without it, an uploaded GIF avatar shows as a still. Emoji are separate: check the size limits and fit the GIF with Compress GIF.
- Instagram posts: the feed does not take GIF files; post it as a short video instead. We tested the options in how to post a GIF on Instagram.
- Phone galleries and file thumbnails can show just the first frame in their overview. If the GIF moves once you open it or send it, the file is fine.
How we tested
For the loop test we wrote three GIFs that differed only in their loop setting and recorded which frame Chrome 156
showed, in a headless browser, by screenshotting the image over and over for five seconds. The
drawing-surface test asked Chrome to save a canvas as image/gif and looked at the type of file it returned.
The Giphy versions were downloaded on 25 October 2026 and opened with an independent image library to count frames.
What PowerPoint, Outlook and Discord do comes from their own help pages, linked above by name; we did not test those
apps ourselves.