Currently searching for animated images is difficult and could be improved. When doing an image search on Firefox (123.0.1 (64-bit) on Windows 11) all GIFs appear as static images. If the GIF is animated only the first frame is shown as a static image. This behavior might be to save on memory which is acceptable, but there's no way to differentiate between static GIFs and animated GIFs.
Some possible suggestions to improve this...
- Identify animated gifs with a small icon in the corner of the image (possibly animated for fun). This makes it easy to identify an image that is animated so the person can browse to the page the view it.
- Add a filtering option for animation, could later be refined with length, framerate, etc.
- Save the whole animated gif/apng/whatever and display that. Uses more resources, bandwidth and storage.
This fits into existing user cases where a user is searching for an image. I.e. setting up a new neocities site and wanting some fun animated rose images. The user searches 'rose' and filters by 'gif' and the proposed 'animated' filter. The user can then browse for a rose they like, click through to view the animation and decide if they want to use that asset on their site.
