Floundering in the dark here.
I have tried to search in Help and here but I have found nothing that appears to me to solve my problem.
I have a number of animated gifs (short bits of film - a few seconds each) which I wish to include in a text document.
Somehow I have imported 1 successfully without knowing how, but I can not import any of the others. The gif shows just the first image of the gif.
I must be missing something obvious.
You can Insert>Image for any supported format. GIF is one of them.
Regarding animated GIFs, this does not make sense in Writer context. Writer is intended to help with formatting and layout of books, i.e. some form of static text very similar to printed material on paper. This means Writer considers images are “permanent” illustrations, not dynamic ones.
Consequently, it does not analyse image property to see if it is animated or not and blindly renders the images. When it arrives at the end of it, it stops, not considering whether it is at end of file or not.
Matters are different in Impress because slides are shown to audience with transition effects. There, animated GIFs in the middle of a slide makes full sense, just as the inclusion of short films.
In addition, you can drag the GIF from a file manager into Writer
In my versions of LibreOffice on Windows 10 animated GIFs continued to loop after insertion.
In my current version of Windows 11 they only seem to loop after saving, closing and re-opening the document.
There are reasons to have animated GIFs because not all Writer documents are intended to be printed, sometimes it is a useful way of conveying an issue that might not be immediately obvious.
I would like to see animated GIF in my documents.
There seems to be a bug. Version 6.4.7.2 supports animated GIFs.
You could add a portable version of LibreOffice or install a parallel version for when you need animated gif, Installing several versions of LibreOffice in parallel - The Document Foundation Wiki