Hey Reddit! We’re Giphy. Let’s talk about GIFs!

OK - Let's have it out. Soft G, or hard G?

hard g for life! http://media.giphy.com/media/j1s5Sv4iolneE/giphy.gif

yeah!!!!

http://media.giphy.com/media/xozcLYDOgWBbi/giphy.gif

If it's a hard G (G as in Golf, not G as Giraffe), then why is your company name written as if it it should be pronounced Jiffy?

I'm a hard G for life

http://i.giphy.com/dOxMHecx24CY.gif

What makes you different to Imgur, Gyfcat, I.Minus, or any other popular gif hosting site?

Awesome question. So user uploads is a new feature for us, as we’ve primarily fiocused on being a gif search engine for all the gifs ever and makes them easy to find.

In terms of hosting, we have feature parity with these other sites, but primarily:

• we’re free
• no file size limits for uploads
• you can tag and organize your gifs
• we offer html5 versions of every gif
• we got nice sharing features (our gifs play inline on FB, twitter)
• we’re eager and willing to build you guys the best tool there is.

Are there other features you’d like to see?

Woah woah woah hold on. Your gifs play on facebook? I've never seen that before. I thought they didn't allow that. I'm gonna have to try it, how does it work? Do gifs auto play in comments?

We got creative! Here's a primer on Giphy GIFs on Facebook: http://giphy.com/posts/how-to-share-giphy-gifs-on-facebook/

Only feature I'd like to see is keeping the fullscreen button. Love having just a an image to share, not all the social fluff.

Also, since you mention that you're free, I'm curious how long you plan to stay that way. I'd love to use this service as long as possible, any plans to make it sustainable?

Sure thing. Fullscreen not going away anytime soon. We also offer the direct link to the .gif file now for easy sharing.

No plans anytime soon to charge, user accounts and uploads are new and we want to get them right and make them useful before we even begin to thing about asking people to pay for them. Also, we've got other machinations in place to keep us afloat.

http://media.giphy.com/media/cXxMRHB8tP2Ba/giphy.gif

Gif creation would be pretty cool. I know it's very much easier said than done, but I reckon that'd be a cool little niche.

Totally! We've got lots of prototypes for gif creation apps and we want to open up some of cool internal gifmaking tools. We're refining things now we'll check back in when we've got something to offer.

Not really a feature request, but why not use HTML5 videos for hovering images on search & frontpage? Would make UX much smoother.

We've mentioned this in other HTML5 questions, but there's still some limitations with html5 video that keep us from this, mainly browser compatibility, portability, and sharing. For one dragging and droping and right click to save are big things for us and you really can't do that with a video right now.

What's your favorite gif ?

This is Tyler, the Editorial Director of Giphy: while I have a whole array of favorite reaction GIFs, for pure GIF bliss, you really can't beat a monkey on a skateboard: http://media.giphy.com/media/BhW85yDQ1TA3u/giphy.gif

Actually, we have a whole series of skateboarding animal GIFs that I revisit fondly from time to time: http://giphy.com/search/skateboarding-animal/

What's your revenue model?

Ideally we'll become an indispensable part of the internet itself and the money will just happen.

http://media.giphy.com/media/2WuHHWbGt3fY4/giphy.gif

But we've got lots of pots cooking, actually. We're focusing on content licenses, sponsored search, and api integrations among other things.

Do you plan to buy imgur?

http://media.giphy.com/media/eHURik5qraVQA/giphy.gif

Here's the thing. You said a "giphy is a gif."

Is it in the same family? Yes. No one's arguing that.

As someone who is a scientist who studies gifs, I am telling you, specifically, in science, no one calls giphys gifs. If you want to be "specific" like you said, then you shouldn't either. They're not the same thing.

If you're saying "gif family" you're referring to the taxonomic grouping of Graphics Interchange Format , which includes things from shittytumblrgifs to wastedgifs to highqualitygifs.

So your reasoning for calling a giphy a gif is because random people "call the low quality ones gifs?" Let's get jpgs and pngs in there, then, too.

Also, calling someone a human or an ape? It's not one or the other, that's not how taxonomy works. They're both. A giphy is a giphy and a member of the gif family. But that's not what you said. You said a giphy is a gif, which is not true unless you're okay with calling all members of the gif family gifs, which means you'd call webm, html5, and mediacrush gifs too. Which you said you don't.

It's okay to just admit you're wrong, you know?

hola. what's the source on giphy is a gif"? happy to clarify but we're not sure what as to what you're referring.

also, how did you become a gif scientist!?!

http://i.imgur.com/9pAAFvn.gif

http://media2.giphy.com/media/STW7fuVhHwQus/200.gif

What was your inspiration for creating giphy.com? And do you guys have any other ideas in the works at the moment?

Funny enough, Giphy actually started as a weekend hack project and was never supposed to go further than that. But it instantly blew up and got a ton of people using it! So we thought: "wow, people really want/need a GIF search engine in their lives!" We've added a ton of features since then, but it always comes back to that simple idea: we want to make finding awesome GIFs easy http://media.giphy.com/media/N2JaONOG63aMM/giphy.gif

Is there anything you could do about redundancy? Something to the effect of: "looks like we already have this GIF, is this what you want?" I bet your service has billions of some of the same GIFs. I would think it would help your space and time.

This is an awesome question and something we've thought about alot. Our gif crawlers don't pull in redundant gifs, but for user's we feel like you should be able to upload and tag whatever you want without us interfering (as long as it follows or terms). We don't mind redundants right now.

Are there plans for a mobile app on the horizon?

Never say never to a mobile app! But until that happens, Giphy is newly mobile optimized and runs much, much faster on mobile than it used to. It's nice, because you can search on your phone, hold down on a GIF, copy and then paste it right into an iMessage. Like emojis, but, your know, this: http://media.giphy.com/media/mf1KcWoiyAcNO/giphy.gif

I really appreciate your GroupMe support. I used to manually post links from you guys and my friends all thought I was a GIF God. Once you partnered with GM – my magic was gone.

yah once you have GIFs in chat you can never go back. it changes everything.

we just integrated with slack and some people have written hipchat plugins as well: http://giphy.com/labs

Do you have an API that people could possibly use to make an app?

Oh most certainly! Build away :)

https://github.com/giphy/GiphyAPI

What is the most gif-able tv show?

For the amount of stone cold classic GIFs that have come out of it, you can't beat "The Simpsons": http://giphy.com/search/the-simpsons

I mean, is there any arguing with this GIF? http://media0.giphy.com/media/jUwpNzg9IcyrK/giphy.gif

How do we measure the gifabilty of a show? Viral gifs per hour (Vg/h) ie how many 'good' gifs produced or by the how viral the gifs are ie. how good 'good' the gifs are?

Forget about the math. You just have to trust your heart. http://media1.giphy.com/media/mnFwhN0P2AVZS/giphy.gif

I have some suggestions, I want to be anti imgur. Your URLs are to long. Galleries galleries galleries! Also give me credit for my gifs I keep finding on your site lol

I have much more I want to say, but I am typing this on a phone while working

And where can I find an open source of your script?

Proper GIF attribution has always been a big part of Giphy's goal since the very beginning, so we're always happy to fix any incorrectly sourced GIFs! You should shoot an email to editor (at) giphy (dot) com so we can talk about getting your GIFs properly attributed!

Will do, thank you

http://media1.giphy.com/media/jfuPz0YEmpMQg/giphy.gif

yes! agreed. our urls are too long. we got a fix for that on the way so hold tight. galleries are in the works too, but we're still planning.

Which gifs are yours? Happy to properly source them to you. We're big on pushing gif artists.

http://giphy.com/artists

As for the script, you mean our crawler? It's not open-source but is built in python and php.

If you're looking to build a crawler, check out

http://splinter.cobrateam.info/

and

http://scrapy.org/

HTH!

I'm going to switch to you guys over imgur for now, see how it goes. What is you max file size?

No max file size right now. :) Only limitation is that connection will eventually time out if the upload takes too long so hopefully you have a decent internet connection.

Let us know what you think about the site and the process. We're still refining. [email protected]

BTW new short url FTW! Gonna put em on the site shortly.

http://i.giphy.com/a3IWyhkEC0p32.gif

Any plans to allow uploading via the API?

YES!! It's actually in beta testing now for a few of our partners but we'll have a public upload endpoint very soon.

http://media.giphy.com/media/5xtDarzgzG6eu6uVwI0/giphy.gif

What's the weirdest GIF you've made/found? The one that made you question what you just saw.

Nick here. This is my top weirdo...

http://media.giphy.com/media/QHHTZAwUzZ7DG/giphy.gif

We've all seen this GIF a million times, but it never fails to weird us out: http://media.giphy.com/media/dzM1V7zzqfuLu/giphy.gif It also ALWAYS performs really well whenever we post it to Facebook. Our FB audience is hungry for weirdness.

Wish I can unsee. :/

http://media.giphy.com/media/PW9A4XrDarYEU/giphy.gif

Thanks for the AMA! I only have one question: funniest gif?

We only have one answer: http://media.giphy.com/media/LLWP1seiT4fC/giphy.gif

How do you feel about WEBMs?

we only have mp4s right now because they're the most accepted video file format across browsers and mobile operating systems (ios), but we like open standards and are considering creating webm versions of our millions of gifs. if there is a demand we'll definitely get started on it. what do you think?

I do like the idea. It seems that ever since 4chan went nuts for them a few months ago, their popularity has steadily been rising. Having a site which supports uploading them as a unique feature doesn't sound bad at all.

Cool. Very helpful! We're making a list of everyone's suggestions and we'll check back in as we release features.

http://media.giphy.com/media/AeWoyE3ZT90YM/giphy.gif

Can you please make a collection of the best gifs from THE BIRDCAGE?

http://media.giphy.com/media/1414ExGiWDbVMA/giphy.gif

Kidding! That's actually an awesome idea. It would make a perfect collection akin to these little lists we've been coming up with like: http://giphy.com/posts/13-gifs-that-proves-the-sandlot-is-the-greatest-summer-movie-ever

Most versatile gif ever?

http://media.giphy.com/media/ZNtYSatSd8Xx6/giphy.gif

Ha, far be it from us to argue with EditingAndLayout! http://media.giphy.com/media/pjuo3lgooDYOI/giphy.gif (But seriously, that is a damn versatile GIF)

Jiffy or Giffy?

http://media.giphy.com/media/FgTqKY4QECTOU/giphy.gif

Legit. You guys are A-ok in my books.

http://media.giphy.com/media/Kmvw4jeFNPWEg/giphy.gif

Hi, thanks for a really entertaining website. What kind of software do you recommend to make gif?

Tyler: So, I'm old school and still like making GIFs in Photoshop. But part of me thinks that's becoming like typing a novel on an old typewriter. There's lots of great products like GIF Brewery and sites like giffffr

Heres a cool hint for Giphy users though: if you have a video file (mp4 or mov) and want to make a GIF of it, just upload it to Giphy! We autoconvert the file to a GIF for you!

Do you guys run your own severs or use something like AWS?

We use AWS. It's awesome for small startups b/c we can quickly add services and not worry about managing them so we can focus on making Giphy better.

Hey Guys! How do you feel about being one of the first gif sites to play inline with twitter?

Are there any other major announcements about other sites you'll be featured in?

Also, is there anything specific about Giphy that your really proud of?

a feature, a specific deal, anything

We're super proud to be one of the first to get GIFs on Twitter. We even helped them build their own functionality. Makes us really happy to keep pushing the edge of things GIF-wise on the web.

Today we're able to share our new Slack integration that just launched so you can have gifs in your chat. We built it alongside the slack team; they're great! Your work chats will never be the same

https://slack.com/integrations

Also, we're super excited about user uploads and opening up our functionality to all you guys. That's why were here so you can help us get it right.

AAAAnnnnndddd We've got some other HUGE things coming soon... really exciting stuff with new products + new partners. Can't wait to share those but there still in the works and hush hush.

http://media.giphy.com/media/1rPE9rqCkJaUM/giphy.gif

What is your favorite sports related .gif?

That poor Browns punter getting a kick to the face is up there.

This GIF makes me laugh every single time: http://media.giphy.com/media/1Qy3mtdSAtg5O/giphy.gif

We also have an excellent collection of coach/player reaction GIFs. Check them out: http://giphy.com/search/football/ -Andrea

Yeah, the "Deathcart" was awesome. So many hilarious things going on.

"DEATHCART" http://media.giphy.com/media/QgVdpT0URYpYA/giphy.gif

Any suggestions/techniques/best practices on how to make gifs a smaller file size?

There's always importing every other frame (or every 3rd frame if you want to live dangerously) in Photoshop and then resaving the file. Or delicately adjusting the lossy and dither when saving. Just be careful, because you'll end up with a small file and a GIF that looks like scrambled Spice channel http://media.giphy.com/media/2iypzGlDDHTfa/giphy.gif

Also, check out Gifsicle for super simple command line GIF creation and editing when file size is an issue http://www.lcdf.org/gifsicle/

Hi all. Love your site! I've seen lots of puppy gifs on there- any favorites? Also, what was the inspiration behind your logo?

Our favorite puppy GIFs always involve their puppy-ish enthusiasm going a little too far, like: http://media.giphy.com/media/4anSKzI3IoSgE/giphy.gif or http://media.giphy.com/media/Ygy34a8bFXTs4/giphy.gif

You're logo looks like the state of Utah. Is there a reason for that?

It's because we're big "Point Break" fans http://media.giphy.com/media/j5QcmXoFWl4Q0/giphy.gif

You mean Utah looks looks like our logo............

Actually, it's a variation of the gif/file icon. Our friends Dark Igloo made it for us:

http://darkigloo.com/

Will you share the results of how well your advertising on this site performs?

What are the most recent GIFs that you personally created?

Reddit advertising is a brand new world for us and we haven't even started the ads yet so we don't have an answer for you yet!

Tyler: BUT, I do have an answer for you on the most recent GIF I created during the Apple Event yesterday: http://media.giphy.com/media/5xtDarwN3Gh6DvdshRm/giphy.gif And I have no shame!

awesome! I love dickbutts dickbutt gifs. You don't have many on your site though.

hey we have 89! need more?

http://giphy.com/search/dickbutt

http://i.giphy.com/11K25sT17xCss8.gif

Big user. Use your site to make my coworkers smile on email exchanges almost every day. Are most of the gifs on your site submitted or does your team upload the most gifs each day?

Awesome! Glad you find us useful. We've built "crawlers" that scour the web and pull in GIFs to our site. This is similar to how Google finds images on the web. We've got millions at this point, and 99% of that volume has come from crawling. Our editorial team then sifts through all the gifs and adds tags and other info so that people can find them with our search.

How do you feel now Webm is set to replace the gif standard?

We love .gifs, but ultimately we're format agnostic. We're more interested in the magical experience that happens when a short sequence of images loops, and we're even more interested in the potential of this experience for communication (goodbye emoji).

We're all for higher quality and lower bandwidth, so webm is a win in that respect (as is mp4). However, until html5 videos enjoy the same level of native support and seamless integration across platforms as GIFs, webm won't fully replace GIFs. Sites may hack around this, but right now browsers treat these formats very differently. Especially on mobile. You can't text a video and have it autoplay and loop, and who wants to have to open up quicktime to watch a GIF on their phone? Looking at you mobile safari....

Any plans to fix GIF tagging? The folksonomy system in place right now leaves a lot to be desired.

Improving tagging on our site has been an ongoing process since day one. Believe us, the improvement in the past year has been staggering, but there's still plenty of room to grow. Be on the look out for a newly improved tag/search system later this year!

When Giphy first started out, most of the tagging was done by a human being. When the number of GIFs started to rise drastically we introduced auto tagging based on metadata. So now we're working hard on making those crawlers smarter and smarter, to reduce the dumb tags we get. (And believe us, we've seen some dumb tags) http://media.giphy.com/media/5xYc45ly7QduU/giphy.gif

How old is your oldest gif? Btw I love your website, keep up the good work <3

I wish we had a clear cut record of the very first GIF we ever indexed into Giphy, but we don't! If we're talking about GIFs of oldest recorded media, we have some killer Eadweard Muybridge GIFs from the 1880s. I like this piggy: http://i.giphy.com/QpCbglgedUJeo.gif

which gorilla gif is your favorite?

This might have been the hardest question so far. But it always comes back to this gorilla eating a taco http://i.giphy.com/98T6GuPzL6VwY.gif

Do you guys have plans on getting a feature for albums?

yes! gonna happen. we're gonna follow up when all the features we've discussed are live.

Who is the hardest working employee there and why is it Tiffany?

hello roofusthedoofus! Tiffany here. You're very kind to say so, but i'm brand spanking new to the team so a TOOONNN of work has been done before I was even a thought! Basically, this team works pretty dang hard.

http://i.giphy.com/GQCjmHAlMuFuE.gif

Do any of you have an all-time favorite gif?

All time favorite GIF might honestly be: http://media.giphy.com/media/jAe22Ec5iICCk/giphy.gif -Tyler

This is just one of them: http://media.giphy.com/media/r5MQpjBfANg4M/giphy.gif -Andrea

MOAR

http://i.giphy.com/tAzgqbszvR9t3KlOUog.gif

http://i.giphy.com/5jiRVGmSxhONi.gif

Another all time favorite from the Giphy team: http://media.giphy.com/media/9YlhdI9SSP0Qw/giphy.gif -Adam

I got a few...

http://i.giphy.com/LLWP1seiT4fC.gif http://i.giphy.com/9Be3HZgoWyrao.gif http://i.giphy.com/2FayYGsFIXX3eMo5G.gif http://i.giphy.com/LaOnE5tBwk2qI.gif

nick

Did you name your website 'Giphy' because 'Giffy' was taken? Or was it because 'Giphy' sounded cool?

LOL actually yes giffy was taken and giphy was the only domain available. Both sound cool though.

http://media.giphy.com/media/3Mm6HZud4m2oU/giphy.gif

Since HTML5 video is the future, how do you plan on transitioning away from GIFs and into video formats exclusively?

Also, why not promote use of the HTML5 versions over the GIF? They work pretty damn well and probably save you guys a lot of bandwidth: http://giphy.com/gifs/5xtDarIt1AVFfvXG2SA/html5

heyo. great question. we know html5 is the future, and we welcome it, but they're not the most shareable/portable yet ie browsers are fickle about video file types, you can't drag and drop a video, videos aren't 100% with it on mobile (they don't autoplay and auto-loop on mobile safari, and they open up quicktime). for now, gifs provide the most seamless, reliable and portable "GIF" experience. as things progress we will too.

When did you guys first think of this whole thing?

So Giphy was originally a weekend hack that just really took off. Gifs are our primary means of communication (like next level emoji), and it just seemed natural that there should be a place to go with all the gifs. Looks like we're not the only ones who feel that way, as we've been growing like crazy ever since.

I really want to have a high quality gif / cinemagraph as my wallpaper, do you think that can be done in the future? Why not now? You know, something like this http://cinemagraphs.com/images/demo/cab-window-429.gif

That is a world we want to live in, too. Imagine this as your iPhone wallpaper http://media.giphy.com/media/IH7vvFbr0UKd2/giphy.gif

We're heading in that direction, slowly but surely!

You mention that you use crawlers for adding gifs to your archives, have you ever had to deal with any illegal content or copyright/DCMA claims on your gifts?

We work really hard to show only the best content on Giphy. So, every GIF you can search for on Giphy has been reviewed by multiple team members, given an MPAA rating, and tagged. As for DMCA claims-- every now and then we'll get one, but they aren't frequent. Like google or other web indexes we respect ownership and copyright infringement and will abide with legitimate take down requests.

Our policy is up here: http://giphy.com/dmca

Hi, I don't know if you are answering questions still.

I've noticed that HTML5 giphy's do not have RES support, is this something you will look into for the future? I used Gfycat because they have that support, and it's important for Reddit use. I will use your service more if you get this.

Also...please make albums for user accounts. Gfycat does not do that either, Imgur does. If you did it, I wouldn't need Imgur or Gfycat.

Thank you!

Thanks for the feedback! User albums are def in our todo queue. RES support is a definite must as well. We're gonna reach out to the RES peeps actually to work on an integration. We'll check back in with everyone with our progress.

Excellent! I wish you guys luck, and will monitor what you guys are doing and the good changes you are making! Keep doing what you're doing!

http://i.giphy.com/F3B7jpfP4hNM4.gif

[deleted]

Hrm it works on our side using chrome on iOS. Our GIFs are just GIFs, so should work. Email [email protected] and we can debug.

Oops, my mistake...

http://i.giphy.com/qDqmpiWoJvp9m.gif