Get an animated icon's motion, as Lottie, GIF or animated PNG.

Only an icon whose search result says isAnimated has one, and about one icon in fifty does. Find them with search_icons(animated=True). Every animated hit already carries permanent animation.gif and animation.apng links, so reach for this tool for the Lottie, or to learn what size a link actually renders at.

Pick by what you are building:

• "lottie" returns the animation as compact Lottie/Bodymovin JSON text - parse it, then hand it to lottie-web, Rive, SwiftUI or Android. It is vector, so it scales to any size and size does not apply. Prefer it on the web - but it is the paid format, so it needs an Icons8 sign-in or a personal API key. "gif" and "apng" need none.

• "gif" plays anywhere with no player.

• "apng" keeps a real alpha channel, so it sits on a coloured background without a matte.

gif and apng come in one size: the one the icon's style draws at. Most styles ignore a requested size - m_outlined renders 24, ios11 30, color 48, office80 80 - and only a few scale. So ask without a size and use what comes back; the result says what it was. If you need a particular size, that is what Lottie is for.

Icons8 publishes no animated SVG for icons. An animated icon's SVG is a still frame, and so are its png, jpg and webp.

Args: icon_id: The unique identifier of the icon ctx: MCP context for API access format: "lottie", "gif" or "apng" (default: "gif"). "lottie" needs a credential; the other two do not size: Pixels, for gif and apng only. Leave it out and you get whatever size this icon's style draws at, with "size" in the result saying which - that is the normal way to call this. Naming a size the icon is not drawn at is refused rather than returning a link that misstates it. A Lottie is vector, so this is not applied to it

Returns: For "lottie", a dictionary whose "lottie" is the animation as a compact JSON string - parse it before handing it to a player. For "gif" and "apng", a dictionary with a "url" that is permanent and needs no credential, and the "size" in pixels it renders at - absent only if the host answered something this server could not measure. On failure, an "error" saying what to ask for instead. A Lottie counts toward the paid-download limit: a refusal carries "retry_after_seconds" and the free "animation" links