gif animation not playing on refresh

Question

First time I view the page with an animated .gif it plays fine on page load (lasts about 2 secs).

On refresh (F5), the .gif no longer plays and only the last frame of gif animation is shown.

Is there anything I can do do to make sure it plays everytime?

Answer 1

For the PHP the much better option then using date("Ymdgis"); is using time(), like this:

<img src="picturePath.gif?<?php echo time();?>" />

Answer 2

Strange behavior that's affects every browser..
I usually refresh it manually with this script (it uses jQuery)

<img id="gif_animata" src="picturePath.gif">
<script type="text/javascript">
    var gifSource = $('#gif_animata').attr('src'); //get the source in the var
    $('#gif_animata').attr('src', ""); //erase the source     
    $('#gif_animata').attr('src', gifSource+"?"+new Date().getTime()); //add the date to the source of the image... :-) 
</script>

This will refresh the src of the image adding the current date, so the browser will re-load it, thinking that's a new image.

Otherwise in PHP way (I prefer this one):

<img src="picturePath.gif?<?php echo date("Ymdgis");?>" />

//for the browser it will seems that's a new picture!
<img src="picturePath.gif?2012092011207">