Question

Is it possible to restart an animated GIF used as background-image?

Consider this HTML:

<div id="face">
    <div id="eyes"></eyes>
</div>

And this style:

#eyes.blink {
    background-image:url('blink.gif');
}

I would like the blink.gif animation to play every time I add the class blink to #eyes, not just the first time.

I expected this to work:

function startBlink() {
    $('#eyes').addClass('blink');
}

function stopBlink() {
    $('#eyes').removeClass('blink');
}

The problem is that both Firefox and WebKit browser do not play a background-image GIF animation again once it has played once. Adding/removing the class blink only works the first time.

Answer 1

You can get the animated gif to replay by reloading it. This isn’t ideal for bandwidth, especially if your image is large, but it will force a restart of the animation.

In my example I’m adding and removing it onclick of <div id="animated">:

$('#animated').click(function() {

    /* Reference to the clicked element and toggle the .go class */
    var $div = $(this);
    $div.toggleClass('go');

    /* Start the animated gif */
    if ($div.hasClass('go')) {

        /* Create an <img> element and give it the animated gif as a src.  To 
           force a reload we add a date parameter to the URL */
        var img = document.createElement('img');
        img.src = "http://yoursite.com/animated.gif?p" + new Date().getTime();

        /* Once the image has loaded, set it as the background-image */
        $(img).load(function(){
            $div.css({backgroundImage: "url("+img.src+")"});
        });

    /* Remove the background-image */        
    } else {
       $div.css({backgroundImage: "none"});
    }
})

Demo of it in action.