Personally, I think animated gifs are past their prime unless repeating (looping) is part of the punchline. A lot of people are converting videos into .gif files these days, which results in horrible quality and large files. However, in the case that using an animated .gif makes sense, EditGif.com and PlayGif.com can come in handy for looking into the details closer.
Let’s say we had a gif that looped, like this guy wearing all of his old sweaters at once:
EditGif.com allows you a few different options on how to analyze a gif image. You can: reverse the animation and loop it, play forward and backward endlessly, split into individual frames, rotate clockwise or counter-clockwise, or rotate 180 degrees.
Let’s split the above .gif so we can see it frame-by-frame. You just paste the URL to any image into the address bar, choose how you want it processed, and hit the submit button.
One other function that EditGif lets you choose is to play the gif at PlayGif.com. PlayGif allows you to pause a gif, reverse them, and change the playback speed.
For a wide variety of other image tools, check out the collection at ImgOps.