Sometimes we see a lot of gif animations on a webpage (usually trying to sell cheap calling cards, or casino on net etc). They tend to be annoying often, and take up CPU cycles too.
I am trying to figure out how to stop the pictures from animating in each browser, primarily in Konqueror.

In netscape at least, you can press 'esc' and gif's will stop moving.

have you tried hitting the stop button within the browser. i know most standard browsers like netscape, IE and others the stop is just like the esc key which will stop animated gifs.. don't know of any other way other than that.

Technically speaking animated gif's are recognized by a browser because it watches for the "NETSCAPE 2.0" (or 1 other) string in a gif file.

You can hexedit your browser and replace this string by a bogus one of the same length like "00000000 000". In Netscape 4 series it isnt hard to find, and occurs 2 times. Behaviour now will be it loops tru the images once and then stops.
*Havent tried it with any other browser tho, but the tag would be the same.

Or you can browse tru a proxy like Webwasher, Junkbuster, Delegated or any other proxy that allows you to totally filter gifs from being shown.

In konqueror 2.2.x you can right click and select "Stop Animations".