Can a Picturebox Show Animated Gif in Windows Application

How do you show animated GIFs on a Windows Form (c#)

It's not too hard.

1. Drop a picturebox onto your form.
2. Add the .gif file as the image in the picturebox
3. Show the picturebox when you are loading.

Things to take into consideration:

• Disabling the picturebox will prevent the gif from being animated.

Another way of doing it:

Another way that I have found that works quite well is the async dialog control that I found on the code project

C# PictureBox with animated GIF skips Frames

Use this code. Since 25 frames per second is displayed, I set the timer to 40, which means one frame every 40 milliseconds. (1000ms / 25 frames = 40ms)

step 1. This method shows how to use

static Image[] images;
int frameCount = 0;
private void Btn_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{  
    //get gif image
    object ezgif_com_video_to_gif = Resources.ResourceManager.GetObject("ezgif_com_video_to_gif");
    images = getFrames((Image)ezgif_com_video_to_gif);//convert to frames array

    //show frames
    System.Timers.Timer timer = new System.Timers.Timer();
    timer.Interval = 40;
    timer.Elapsed += Timer_Elapsed;
    timer.Start();
}

step 2. add timer tick

private void Timer_Elapsed(object sender, System.Timers.ElapsedEventArgs e)
{
    pictureBox1.Image = images[frameCount];
    frameCount++;
    if (frameCount > images.Length - 1)
        frameCount = 0;
}

step 3. convert gif to frames

Image[] getFrames(Image originalImg)
{
    int numberOfFrames = originalImg.GetFrameCount(FrameDimension.Time);
    Image[] frames = new Image[numberOfFrames];

    for (int i = 0; i < numberOfFrames; i++)
    {
        originalImg.SelectActiveFrame(FrameDimension.Time, i);
        frames[i] = ((Image)originalImg.Clone());
    }

    return frames;
}

Showing animated gif in Winforms without locking the file

Using a MemoryStream is indeed the right way to avoid the file lock. Which is a strong optimization btw, the lock is created by the memory-mapped file that the Image class uses to keep the pixel data out of the paging file. That matters a great deal when the bitmap is large. Hopefully not on an animated gif :)

A small mistake in your code snippet, you forgot to reset the stream back to the start of the data. Fix:

 using (var fs = new System.IO.FileStream(...)) {
     var ms = new System.IO.MemoryStream();
     fs.CopyTo(ms);
     ms.Position = 0;                               // <=== here
     if (pic.Image != null) pic.Image.Dispose(); 
     pic.Image = Image.FromStream(ms);
 } 

In case it needs to be said: do not dispose the memory stream. That causes very hard to diagnose random crashes later, pixel data is read lazily.

Winform applicaton not animating picturebox gif while processing data from Excel

In case you have a loop inside of youre code add

Application.DoEvents()

inside of the loop

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