Display animated GIF images in CollectiveAccess

In CollectiveAccess (CA) Pawtucket2 part (public site), GIF images are not animated by default. Here is a way to let GIF images to be animated.

This tutorial is tested for CollectiveAccess 1.7.17 and 2.0.9 but may work with intermediate and later versions.

The media_display.conf file

This configuration file (in Pawtucket’s app/conf or app/conf/local directory) is used to assign which viewer is used for which image format.

In the default_viewers = {…} part of this file, one can find different sub-parts named: images, video, quicktimevr, audio, pdf, text, 3d, 360, binary.

GIF format appears in the images sub-part, as defined in the mimetypes list: image/gif

mimetypes = {image/gif, image/jpeg, image/tiff, image/png, image/x-dcraw, image/x-psd, image/x-dpx, image/jp2, image/x-adobe-dng, image/x-dcraw, application/dicom, image/bmp, image/x-bmp},

and assigned viewer is TileViewer:

viewer = TileViewer

But it seems that TileViewer isn’t displaying correctly animated GIF images.

To resolve this issue, I suggest switching to QTVR as this viewer.

To do so, create a new part in default_viewers dedicated to GIF format, which we will call image_gif. Remove the mimetype image/gif from the list of mimetypes of images part and add it in the list of mimetypes for image_gif, like this:

default_viewers = {
     image_gif = {
         mimetypes = {image/gif},
         viewer = QTVR
     },
     images = {
#        mimetypes = {image/gif, image/jpeg, image/tiff, image/png, image/x-dcraw, image/x-psd, image/x-dpx, image/jp2, image/x-adobe-dng, image/x-dcraw, application/dicom, image/bmp, image/x-bmp},
         mimetypes = {image/jpeg, image/tiff, image/png, image/x-dcraw, image/x-psd, image/x-dpx, image/jp2, image/x-adobe-dng, image/x-dcraw, application/dicom, image/bmp, image/x-bmp},
     viewer = TileViewer
     },
     …
…
}

Flush the cache files and test it.

For an example of application see this object:

https://collections.univ-pau.fr/pub/index.php/Detail/objects/605

Choose the second image:

Ordisavant Yeno

You should see the animated GIF:

Ordisavant Yeno