Play Animations in GIF with Tkinter

Question

I've been trying to play an animated gif using Tkinter.PhotoImage, but haven't been seeing any success. It displays the image, but not the animation. The following is my code:

root = Tkinter.Tk()
photo = Tkinter.PhotoImage(file = "path/to/image.gif")
label = Tkinter.Label(image = photo)
label.pack()
root.mainloop()

It displays the image in a window, and that's it. I'm thinking that the issue has something to do with Tkinter.Label but I'm not sure. I've looked for solutions but they all tell me to use PIL (Python Imaging Library), and it's something that I don't want to use.

With the answer, I created some more code (which still doesn't work...), here it is:

from Tkinter import *

def run_animation():
    while True:
        try:
            global photo
            global frame
            global label
            photo = PhotoImage(
                file = photo_path,
                format = "gif - {}".format(frame)
                )

            label.configure(image = nextframe)

            frame = frame + 1

        except Exception:
            frame = 1
            break

root = Tk()
photo_path = "/users/zinedine/downloads/091.gif"

photo = PhotoImage(
    file = photo_path,
    )
label = Label(
    image = photo
    )
animate = Button(
    root,
    text = "animate",
    command = run_animation
    )

label.pack()
animate.pack()

root.mainloop()

Thanks for everything! :)

Answer 1

You have to drive the animation yourself in Tk. An animated gif consists of a number of frames in a single file. Tk loads the first frame but you can specify different frames by passing an index parameter when creating the image. For example:

frame2 = PhotoImage(file=imagefilename, format="gif -index 2")

If you load up all the frames into separate PhotoImages and then use timer events to switch the frame being shown (label.configure(image=nextframe)). The delay on the timer lets you control the animation speed. There is nothing provided to give you the number of frames in the image other than it failing to create a frame once you exceed the frame count.

See the photo Tk manual page for the official word.