hi, I would like to be able to choose which frame to show in the gif preview.
I know, it’s probably not among the priorities… but I wanted to point out this feedback to you. Cheers!
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Ciao Valeria, as you may know, the current workaround is to add the desired preview image to the very first frame of the GIF.
This will result in a minor glitch at the start of the animation.
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I’ve been trying to upload gifs as previews and despite setting proper frame as the 1st frame, makerworld sometimes chooses 2nd frame. On top of that I’ve been fighting with some hidden optimizations: When the whole gif is simply converted video, makerworld doesn’t seem to mind, but when the video is animation made in gimp or some other tool to allow text on 1st frame it looses it’s mind and causes the whole gif to be super slow… What’s funny, the 1st time I’ve noticed that the “fix” was to delete cover image, upload it into gallery of normal images and then add the image as cover. Today I’m trying to no avail…
I can also see other optimizations behind the courtains, eg: gifs are converted to animated webp, but if I upload proper animated webp, makerworld only shows it as single frame image with no animation 
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As @SnaKKo said I just make the first frame of my gif include the extra text/graphics i’d like. It does make it loop a bit weirdly but not too bad.
@Johnny_Bit for some reason if you upload a webp/webm under the ‘model photos’ section it will only be a static image. But if you upload the webp/webm to the model description itself it will play just fine.
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After long trial and error with gifs in makerworld I found out that the root problem is that if I wanted to make 1st frame (the one with text) last longer then makerworld would “optimize” the resulting webp to have same framerate. So as a workaround I copy first frame several times so it’s enough to read the content and then let the normal frames continue at normal rate. This is a bit wonky because any gif optimizing software detects that those frames are copies and tries to do one long frame so I need to upload only non-optimized gifs and rely on makerworld’s gif-to-webp optimization 
Honestly for prints with moving parts or interactive ones I’d love if we could get better tools for handling cover photo animations (especially on mobile)
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