How do you show ajax gif only for a specific request? For example my page is calling a web-service every 30 seconds in a background, and I don't want to show the gif during this callback. On the other hand I want to show the gif, when I'am making manual ajax requests. I am using jQuery. edit: I didn't setup the global handler as shown here http://api.jquery.com/ajaxStart/, just by attaching to the .ajaxStart event. But I don't want to show/hide the gif manually on every request too. I need some generic solution.