Face-front won't work with a flat bed scan, and I would have to use a digital camera image. I don't have that big an accumulation of those yet.

I don't think I know what you have.....can you post a picture?

You need to use an image viewer, not windows media player. "WMP by itself can not open image files but, when WMP does not know how to open a file, it relies on DirectShow and it so happens that a system library called DES (which is used for video editing by e.g. WindowsMovieMaker) contains a DirectShow source filter that can open image files in several common formats (BMP, DIB, GIF, JPEG, TGA) and make them appear as videos to DirectShow and hence to WMP. "

I imagine you can embed an animated gif the same as you would any image. Upload it to one of the many image hosting sites and use the HTML code they provide. Of course you can always grab the direct link and use it in a simple template such as this: <img src="URLofTheImage"> Most image hosting sites allow direct(hot) linking, but at least one I can think of does not. Personally, I would, and do, avoid such hosts. As an example, there's a rotating smiley located at: http://i700.photobucket.com/albums/ww7/chuggerguy/stylish/rotatingSmiley_zpsf88451d6.gif To post it here, I could either grab the HTML embed code they provide or plug that URL(address) into the template above, like this: <img src="http://i700.photobucket.com/albums/ww7/chuggerguy/stylish/rotatingSmiley_zpsf88451d6.gif"> Which once posted here becomes: BTW, an actual direct link to an image almost always starts with http/s, ends with an image extension such as gif, png, jpg, jpeg, etc. and does not include a question mark in between. The presence of a question mark usually(always?) indicates what you have is not the direct URL of the image but instead, of a page that displays the image, and that won't work.