Edit: i see I've posted this before, my bad
You can use ffmpeg to import gifs, as you are on Linux there's a good chance ffmpeg is pre installed.
You just have to type ffmpeg in the preferences>startup>ffmpeg path
Oh, no worries! Yeah, you first showed me the ffmpeg trick some time back, thank you! But it works unpredictably and it would sometimes hang the app.
Meantime, is there anything I can do about the thumbnails? I've been having to save pngs with the same name as the pxo so that I can have an idea of what file I'm opening, but when working with multiple files, it tends to become cumbersome. Any help would be appreciated.
There's currently one for the dolphin file manager. You can try to use that as reference for the nemo file manager (which mint uses)
https://github.com/OverloadedOrama/dolphin_pxo_thumbnailer/tree/main
Mint XFCE uses Thunar, unfortunately. I just installed Dolphin and some extra Cmake modules, but it keeps throwing errors probably because I'm not on a native KDE environment. Hopefully, a version for Thunar can be made. It would really make my day! Thank you for all your help. I really appreciate it.