animated gifs and windows photo viewer

For anyone on windows 8 (or 8.1), you can get corgano's modification to work by going to the path that was installed by his installer C:/Windows/Gif

then right click rundll32 -> Properties -> compatibility -> set it to run for compatibility with windows 7

Then it should work fine.

Thank you, corgano for your program, works great, just what I was looking for!

It really sucks that MS did away with the native viewer for animated images and I absolutely hate opening them in IE or any other browser. HP sent my laptop back with Win 7 on it rather than the XP I sent it to them with and I soon discovered the issue with viewing animated gifs. Upon doing a search it led me here. I use both the old gifview and the XP Photo and Fax viewer. I like how the old one can stop the animation and I like the zoom feature of the updated one. Thanks again! :)

brlasonny913 said:

Corgano, I installed your program, and on trying to open a .gif, I got an error

"Error lodaing C:\Windows\gif\shimgvw.dll

A dynamic link library (DLL) initialization routine failed"

Can you advise, please?

I had the same error running it in my Win 7 Pro x64, and found that it could be fixed by going into the rundll32.exe properties and selecting run in compatibility->win 7 fixed it. Not sure if SP1 somehow affects it in certain machines but it worked flawlessly after I did that.

& that's just a smidge of how I feel!! I've been back & forth between the 2 different Gif/Photo Viewer threads 1000 times going back many pages each time (mainly looking for posts by Bongo & Britton), finally decided to just do it & this is what I ended up with! ( & I don't even like or ever deal with Google so almost backed away when I realized where I was going)

Tried to use "XP Photo and fax viewer (For GIFS on Win 7)", but when I use the right click "Open With", and chose the "Photo and fax Viewer" I get this message.

To resolve the...

"Error loading C:\Windows\gif\shimgvw.dll
A dynamic link library (DLL) initialization routine failed"

... error, I set the properties of "C:\Windows\gif\rundll32.exe" to run in 'Windows XP SP3 Compatibility Mode'.

BeBopGigolo said:

To resolve the...

"Error loading C:\Windows\gif\shimgvw.dll
A dynamic link library (DLL) initialization routine failed"

... error, I set the properties of "C:\Windows\gif\rundll32.exe" to run in 'Windows XP SP3 Compatibility Mode'.

It will actually work better if you set it to "Windows Vista" Compatibility Mode. That way you won't get that annoying UAC prompt.

tiedye93 said:

Hey I downloaded the gifs viewer and all my gifs are slower than what they were before. Do you know how to speed them up?

I WANT MY GIFS said:

Yeah, but that is another program, not windows photo viewer.
I corrected the compatibility of rundll32.exe to vista.
I was searching for the folder in the program folder , not in the windows folder.

That said, my problem of the gifs playing at half speed is still there.
my OS is a 64-bit system, is that a problem?

ksdixon said:

Thanks for the re-write of the original coder's program. But is there a reason as to why an animated gif that plays at normal speed in IE is slow in his/your programs, in regular or slideshow view mode?

Hi corgano,

Not sure if you're still willing to improve this, but there seems to still be some speed issues with some users--including me. I scrolled through this entire thread and the one on the MDL forums, and haven't seen anyone address this or even respond to these posts. To be clear, the issue is that gifs playback slower (doesn't seem as slow as 0.5x as one user suggested) in the Windows PF Viewer than in IE or Chrome.

Thanks

Edit: I am using Windows 8.1 Update 1 Pro x64 and have tried every possible compatibility setting with rundll32.exe

trlkly said:

BeBopGigolo said:

To resolve the...

"Error loading C:\Windows\gif\shimgvw.dll
A dynamic link library (DLL) initialization routine failed"

... error, I set the properties of "C:\Windows\gif\rundll32.exe" to run in 'Windows XP SP3 Compatibility Mode'.

It will actually work better if you set it to "Windows Vista" Compatibility Mode. That way you won't get that annoying UAC prompt.

Hi, I'm running Window 7 pro x64, so where do you find "C:\Windows\gif\rundll32.exe" to change the compatibility to Vista?
Thanks John, roukie

Hi Guys,

I just wanted to say thank you to all, for after reading a 100 posts or more, LOL, I finally found how to make windows 7 play the GIF's again...

Thanks again for all the help!

John Young