Animated GIFs are everywhere on the Internet: from fancy forum avatars to ad banners. It’s true, web browsers can play them, but if you want a bit more, 7GIF is a free tool, for viewing GIF files, that offers the possibility of playing animated GIFs frame-by-frame and a few other useful options.
Installation & Requirements
The snappy setup will take you through a few basic settings and display a summary for them, before the actual install process begins. The tiny GIF player supports Windows XP, Vista, 7 and 8 without additional requirements. Moreover, the application is also available as a portable version.
Interface
Aiming to be very easy to use, 7GIF accomplishes the goal through its clean interface, only populated by a small toolbar at the bottom. Opening a GIF file can be done via drag & drop or by browsing to the files location using the Open option. Besides the standard play/pause/stop controls, 7GIF includes more navigation options such as next and previous frame, rewind and increase/reduce speed.
Users can manually zoom in and out, view the GIF files at their default size (100%) or max the images to fit the window. To make things easier, 7GIF also has previous/next file functions that let you view all the GIFs from a folder, one after another.
The Tools menu offers other useful options, such as the possibility to save all frames or just the current one. From there, users can also print the current frame, access the file’s properties, view the file in fullscreen mode, change the background color and access the program’s advanced settings among other features.
The advanced settings window has three tabs, dedicated to general settings, file associations and languages. The General tab includes plenty of useful options such as preserving the window’s position, size and background color when closing, pause the animation when 7GIF is not the active window, enable transparency effect and setting the default zoom level for GIF playback.
The tab dedicated for associations, basically lets you reassociate GIF files with the program or unassociate them and the last tab allows users to choose between English, Italian, French and Spanish as the UI’s language.
Pros
– Fast, adware-free installation.
– Clean UI with an icon-based toolbar.
– Frame-by-frame navigation is supported.
– Frames can be extracted and printed.
– Allows users to quickly navigate between the GIFs located in a folder.
Cons
– None worth mentioning.
Conclusion
7GIF offers a simple solution for those that want to easily navigate, save and extract frames from animated GIFs. With no bells and whistles, this free tool has a good set of features for GIF playback and is easy enough to be accessible for most users.
