How to Save Animated Images with SingleFile
As I was preparing for this piece, the title was originally ‘how to save GIFs’, only to realize that will confuse even more readers and users of SingleFile. If you have tried to save a webpage using SaveFile that contains modern animated images, likely the result would not contain the image itself.
The problem goes back to the GIF as a format itself. As an antiquated format from the late 1980s, it only supports 8-bit color and at the much larger file size. Modern video formats can do both much better; it is simply a question of what is the new de facto standard. SingleFile, however, treats video formats as video formats, despite its newly adapted usage on the webpage.
On the Options page for SingleFile > Network, under blocked resources, uncheck video and audio. Download the webpage again to see if now all the media is displayed correctly. If some of the media is on a carousel, such as a photo carousel, consider unblocking scripts as well.
It is a bit tricky situation, as some of the new formats used in the websites are technically video formats. I’ve seen some websites using .mp4, which was exactly the problem I had with the SingleFile. avif and webp were less an issue. Ultimately, I believe this is more a question of UI, how to communicate the fact that there are skipped media on the webpage.