The vips I have locally doesn't support gif images. I think you can compile it with libMagick to use image magick's image loading routine, but then things probably aren't any memory efficient (Just a guess, haven't actually looked). On top of that, it seems doubtful it would support animation in gifs if it doesn't support the format natively. In any case this would all require much more investigation. On top of that gifs usually aren't a problem format for failing to render (Failing to render more than one frame is a common problem). I feel like to make this actually work as we want, we'd probably have to add things to vips to support gif.

We have much more pressing formats to start using VIPS with anyhow, so changing priority -> low