Animated GIFs are technically images instead of videos, so click-to-play plugins and video-blocking extensions like FlashBlock won’t stop them from automatically playing. This used to be easier: You could just press the “Esc” key to pause animated GIFs on the current page.

How do I pause animated GIFs in Chrome?

Yes, you can actually pause GIFs. You right click on it, then click something along the lines of “controls” and then you get a pause and play button!

How do you pause a GIF on mobile?

When on mobile you can pause gifs by clicking the ‘Share’ button. This will bring up the sharing options and pause the gif until you need to resume. You can then just click above the sharing options to go back to the page and the gif will resume.