How to display an animated gif with Linux?

Image.show dumps the image to a temporary file and then tries to display the file. It calls ImageShow.Viewer.show_image (see /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/PIL/ImageShow.py):

class Viewer: def save_image(self, image): # save to temporary file, and return filename return image._dump(format=self.get_format(image)) def show_image(self, image, **options): # display given image return self.show_file(self.save_image(image), **options) def show_file(self, file, **options): # display given file os.system(self.get_command(file, **options)) return 1 

AFAIK, the standard PIL can not save animated GIfs¹.

The image._dump call in Viewer.save_image only saves the first frame. So no matter what viewer is subsequently called, you only see a static image.

If you have Imagemagick's display program, then you should also have its animate program. So if you have the GIF as a file already, then you could use

animate /path/to/animated.gif 

To do so from within Python, you could use the subprocess module (instead of img.show):

import subprocess proc = subprocess.Popen(['animate', '/path/to/animated.gif']) proc.communicate() 

¹ According to kostmo, there is a script to save animated GIFS with PIL.

To show the animation without blocking the main process, use a separate thread to spawn the animate command:

import subprocess import threading def worker(): proc = subprocess.Popen(['animate', '/path/to/animated.gif']) proc.communicate() t = threading.Thread(target = worker) t.daemon = True t.start() # do other stuff in main process t.join()