How to Display Animated GIF in a Xamarin based Android Application?

Related: Display Animated GIF in a Xamarin based Android Application

Android doesn’t provide any support for GIF animation in the ImageView. This post gives you complete information about displaying GIF in a Xamarin based Android application.

Note: This example is based on Xamarin based Android Application using C# language. If you are looking for a native java based solution, I like to suggest StackOverflow post( https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6533942/adding-gif-image-in-an-imageview-in-android)

Please follow the following steps to display animated GIF in an Android application.

Step 1: Install “Refractored.GifImageView” Nuget package into your Xamarin based Android project.

Link: https://www.nuget.org/packages/Refractored.GifImageView

Step 2: Add the following code into your Main Android Layout file (XML) or in the layout where you want to display GIF image.

<com.felipecsl.gifimageview.library.GifImageView
    android:id="@+id/myGIFImage"
    android:layout_gravity="center"
    android:scaleType="fitCenter"
    android:layout_width="match_parent"
    android:layout_height="match_parent" />

Step 3: Add GIF file to your Drawable folder ( here loading.gif)

Step 4: Update your Activity class.

Add using statement:

using Felipecsl.GifImageViewLibrary;

Find the GIFImageView and load animation

GifImageView myGIFImage;   

protected override void OnCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState)
{
    base.OnCreate(savedInstanceState);

    // Set our view from the "main" layout resource
    SetContentView(Resource.Layout.Main);

    myGIFImage= FindViewById<GifImageView>(Resource.Id.myGIFImage);
    // From Drawable
                Stream input = Resources.OpenRawResource(Resource.Drawable.loading);
                
                // You should convert the "input" into Byte Array 
                byte[] bytes = ConvertByteArray(input);
                
                myGIFImage.SetBytes(bytes);
                myGIFImage.StartAnimation();

}
private byte[] ConvertByteArray(Stream input)
                {
                    byte[] buffer = new byte[16 * 1024];
                    using (MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream())
                    {
                        int read;
                        while ((read = input.Read(buffer, 0, buffer.Length)) > 0)
                            ms.Write(buffer, 0, read);
                        return ms.ToArray();
                    }
                }

You can stop animation using the following code

myGIFImage.StopAnimation();

and start again using 

 myGIFImage.StartAnimation();

That all done. You can also find more details about the same here (https://github.com/Jignesh-Darji/GifImageView-Xamarin.Android)

Read more Xamarin related posts: https://jigneshdarji.com/category/xamarin/