Why is options.animated=true not the default?

[Alfagun74]

Question about an existing feature

I had a rather frustrating user experience, because why would anyone input a gif and expect it not to read all animated frames? I find this rather unintuitive and would like to suggest options.animated=true as the default.

Related: #3625

[lovell]

This is a tricky one as defaulting to reading all frames of an animated image could lead to unexpected behaviour on the output side.

As you've seen from the documentation, the underlying libvips processes multiples frames as a vertically-stacked "toilet roll" image. When using an output format that does not support animation, the image will contain the stack of frames. This implementation detail of libvips has caused more support overhead than anything relating to the default value for animated, so the evidence is that the current behaviour is optimal.

It's not unusual to see really, really large GIF images. Defaulting to only reading the first frame is partly a safety feature; you need to explicitly opt-in to what could potentially be a resource hog.

In my experience, most animated images should have been a video.

[Alfagun74]

I respectfully disagree. GIFs are meant to be animated and are incredibly prevalent in today's Internet culture. They serve a unique purpose in communication by providing small & fast looping animations that play automatically without user interaction.

The default setting of reading only the first frame of a GIF overlooks its intended use. This setting simply provides a less intuitive user experience.

But do as you like :)