Apple m1 indesign
Sure enough, if you export to EPUB and view in iBooks, you’ll see the GIF play. Preview a spread with a placed GIF and it plays just fine in the panel. However, if you look in the EPUB Interactivity Preview panel, you get the first sign of where animated GIFs might work. (Image Import Options only gives you controls for color and transparency.) Since the file is not recognized as a video, the Media panel is empty, and you can’t assign a button action to play the GIF.
When you place the file, all you get is a static image of the first frame. You can of course, place animated GIFs into your documents, but InDesign has (almost) no idea that the images are supposed to be animated. It’s not a topic that comes up very often, but on the chance that you may have a GIF or two that you want to use in a project, here’s the scoop. I was once asked an interesting question about using animated GIFs in interactive documents exported from InDesign.