Gifer

You can open GIFs with pretty much any image viewer, but most of these programs don’t give you a lot of control when watching them. If you want to pause the animations or view them frame-by-frame, you’re going to need an application like Gifer.

A small, portable and open-source utility, Gifer is very easy to deploy and can serve as a general-purpose image viewer as well. It can be controlled almost entirely with hotkeys, and it features a borderless UI.

The application’s standout feature is the level of control it gives you when viewing GIF files. You can pause/unpause the animation by pressing Space and move to the next/previous frame using the < / > keys.

The other shortcuts apply to all other image files. You can zoom in or out by scrolling the mouse wheel, move the image by dragging it around and switch to the next/previous file using the arrow keys.

If GIFs aren’t all you want to open, Gifer still does a pretty good job. The borderless UI is certain to impress many users, and it is great for quickly cycling through all the images in a certain folder.

To open a file with the program, you can either drop it in the Help window or on the executable file. Alternatively, you can just set it as the default application for opening various types of images.

As the name suggests, Gifer was primarily designed for viewing GIF animations, and it does that brilliantly. It allows you to navigate through the animation and pause it freely, which is something most image viewers do not support.

While it may not offer enough features to replace your main image viewer, its lightweight, portable design is sure to appeal to some users.