Make mpv hold on the last picture instead of closing

You'd use mpv --keep-open=yes, which you can find in the mpv manpage.

It allows three values: no (close/advance to next at end of video, the default), yes (advance if there is a next video, otherwise pause), and always (always pause at end of video, even if there is a next video).

You should also be able to put keep-open=yes in your ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf or ~/.mpv/config (whichever you're using)

Thanks to derobert for hinting me towards this:

If you do want to use keep-openbut don't want that behavior all the time, I wrote a little script to turn it on just once:

reset_keep_open = false
keep_open_val = nil
function nopause()
    print("Not pausing after current")
    if keep_open_val ~= nil then
        mp.set_property("keep-open", keep_open_val)
    end
    reset_keep_open = false
end
function pause_after_current()
    if reset_keep_open == false then
        keep_open_val = mp.get_property("keep-open")
        reset_keep_open = true
        mp.set_property("keep-open", "always")
        print("Pause after current.")
    else
        nopause()
    end
end
function on_pause_change(name, value)
    if reset_keep_open then
        nopause()
    end
end
mp.observe_property("pause", "bool", on_pause_change)
mp.add_key_binding("P", "pause_after_current", pause_after_current)

(Goes into ~/.config/mpv/scripts/pauseaftercurrent.lua)

However, I could have made my life a lot easier by just putting

P cycle keep-open up

into my input.conf.