I have a group message where my friends and I enjoy sharing animated GIFs. Sometimes, when one of these stays on screen for a long time, it will eat my CPU and cause my fan to spin up/make noise.

I enjoy the GIFs, but in order to keep my fan quiet, I often delete them, which reduces the CPU usage. I have a hunch that if I could pause the animation, it wouldn't use as much processor power. Is there any way I can do this?

I'm currently on OS X Yosemite (10.10.3) and using Messages 8.0 (4752)

Edit by Tetsujin Aug '17
The bounty I'm offering isn't for the same reason as the OP, i.e. CPU, but merely the irritation factor of watching them go round & round & round ... & round...

  • Do GIF's really take up that much CPU? A GIF is just a bunch of frames and should be of no harm to the CPU. – CousinCocaine Aug 24 '17 at 9:30
  • 2
    I thought I'd throw a bounty at this rather than set up a dupe. For me, it's purely the irritation factor - I've probably seen Snoopy hug Charlie Brown a thousand times out of the corner of my eye this morning. The only reason it's not in the bin yet is just in case there's a pause button somewhere ;) – Tetsujin Aug 24 '17 at 9:32

You can not pause an animated GIF.

But build-in in your operating system is the power of App Nap which is developed just for your needs. Shamelessly copied from the 'Power Efficiency in OSX' PDF from apple.com. It is an easy read.

App Nap

While your Mac can run many different apps at the same time, the reality is that you’re typically interacting with only one of them, and in some cases (such as using a full-screen app), you can’t even see what the other apps are doing. App Nap takes advantage of this fact by putting applications that you can’t see into a special low- power state that regulates their CPU usage as well as network and disk I/O. App Nap can be automatically triggered in the following situations:

• The app’s windows are not visible.

• The app is not playing audio.

• The developer has not explicitly made the app exempt from App Nap by using the existing IOKit IOPMAssertion API (currently used in OS X to prevent the system from sleeping while an app is busy).

• An app is in background and hasn’t drawn recently.

Btw: GIF is pronounced as pronounced as ɡɪf or dʒɪf ;)

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  • Not really a fix - if the app's window is not visible, it's not irritating ;-) Netscape used to be able to play gifs once through, then stop. – Tetsujin Aug 24 '17 at 9:26
  • Ha ha, that was what I thought as well, but the OP even enjoys the GIFs, he justs wants less CPU usage ;), Safari also has such a plugin: sixcolors.com/post/2016/03/stop-safari-from-animating-gifs – CousinCocaine Aug 24 '17 at 9:29

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