Which Award-Winning GIF Could You Watch on Loop Forever?

Wikimedia Commons holds well over a hundred million free files, and only a sliver of them survive the community vote that makes a Featured Picture. Animated GIFs almost never make it. This bracket is the short list that did.

Most of them were drawn to explain something. A zipper closing tooth by tooth, a sewing machine tying a stitch, a Geneva drive clicking forward one slot at a time — each was made so a reader could finally see how a thing works, and each happens to be almost impossible to stop watching.

The rest wander further. There's Muybridge's horse, published in 1887 to settle whether all four hooves leave the ground. There's Jupiter turning under Voyager 1, a webcam dissected by X-ray tomography, a cicada crawling out of its own shell one frame a minute, and a Victorian spinning disc full of running rats.

Every candidate is free to reuse, and every one loops. Pick the one you'd leave running in a tab all day.