• Inferring Creativity

    February 7, 2024 by Bjorn Roche

    Nick Hasty holding a skull.

    Nick Hasty, GIPHY’s VP of Product, Machine Learning was recently interviewed on the ML Ops Community Podcast where he talked about GIPHY’s history, some AI/ML projects GIPHY has done over the years, and the current AI startup landscape. You watch the... more »

  • From GIFs To Git: Learning to Code & Debugging Self Doubt

    November 1, 2023 by Jake Martella

    Jake Martella tells us how he, as a non-engineer, created an internal tool now used by Staff at GIPHY, including himself.

  • Making the internet a better place

    August 18, 2022 by Matheus Morett

    The Problem When people use GIPHY, they are looking to express themselves in a fun and entertaining way. Certain search results might seem funny and ironic to some but can trigger others who are struggling with mental health. With this... more »

  • How do I stay effective as a software engineer?

    July 12, 2022 by Sixuan Liu

    working on the beach

    As a software engineer, I’ve always been seeking ways to stay effective. Since I’ve been working in tech for 10+ years, I’ve had the opportunity to interact with a lot of incredible individuals. I’ve seen the techniques that top performers... more »

  • Real-Time iOS Camera Video Matting via CoreML

    May 5, 2022 by Dmitry Voitekh

    In this article, I will share the implementation details of an iOS SwiftUI app with CoreML features. The app captures a front camera stream, applies a state-of-the-art Video Matting model, and outputs a corresponding video sequence without a background (a.k.a.... more »

  • Giphy SDK: Bridging Native SDKs in React Native

    November 17, 2021 by Valentyn Pshoniuk

    To make it easier for React Native developers to implement GIPHY and let their users share GIFs, Clips, and more, we released the GIPHY SDK for React Native a few months ago.

  • GIPHY Product Spotlight: A/B testing in Search

    May 26, 2021 by Alex Anderson

    A/B Testing in Search I joined the Search team in February as their Product Manager after 2 years in the Data Science department. I’ve always admired how the team deeply integrated analytics into the Search algorithm. As I began to... more »

  • How GIPHY uses Fastly to Achieve Global Scale

    April 20, 2021 by Ethan Lu

    GIPHY serves a lot of GIF media content. Over 10 billion pieces of content per day, in fact. In addition to media requests, which represent the actual download of GIFs, we also provide public API and SDK services for developers... more »

  • GIPHY Text is Now Live in Our SDK and Chrome Extensions

    March 18, 2021 by GIPHY

    GIPHY *literally* has a gazillion pieces of content indexed in its library. Just head over to the website GIPHY.com and type in your fav search terms to get a sense of the incredibly vast amount of results (GIFs, Stickers, Clips,... more »

  • GIPHY2Vec: Natural Language Processing @ GIPHY

    February 26, 2021 by Nick Hasty

    At Betaworks Studios’ “RENDER(lite); GPT-What?” conference, Director of Machine Learning, Nick Hasty spoke on our in-house NLP tool called “GIPHY2Vec” (a modification of Word2Vec). To learn more, check out the full talk below! For more great content, keep an eye... more »

  • Part 2: Computer Vision @ GIPHY: How we Created an AutoTagging Model Using Deep Learning

    January 11, 2021 by Dmitry Voitekh

    This is part two of the GIPHY Autotagging blog post series, where we’ll cover modeling, configuration of our training environment, and share our results. In part one, we outlined our motivation for this product and provided an overview of existing... more »

  • GIPHY Search Trends During the 2020 Presidential Election

    December 14, 2020 by Nick Hasty

    Major social and cultural events mean “all hands on deck” here at GIPHY, as millions of people across the world use GIFs to express themselves as these events unfold. Award shows, championship games, and holidays (such as New Year’s Eve)... more »

  • Part 1: Computer Vision @ GIPHY: How we Created an AutoTagging Model Using Deep Learning

    December 3, 2020 by Dmitry Voitekh

    Motivation GIPHY search is powered by ElasticSearch, where GIFs are represented as documents with various features, such as tags and captions. Tags in particular have a great impact on the search performance. Therefore, at GIPHY Engineering, we continuously track and... more »

  • GIPHY SDK Debuts its Latest Service, GIPHY Text, with Select Launch Partners

    October 28, 2020 by Dan Burke

    GIPHY users have relied on us to help them better express themselves since day one. First, with GIFs, and later followed by Stickers, animated emoji & text, Video, etc. We know, based on the frequent use of captions on GIFs,... more »

  • Spinnaker @ GIPHY

    August 28, 2020 by Bryant Rockoff

    Like many companies, GIPHY Engineering has been using Kubernetes for the past several years to help our teams quickly build, compile into containers, and distribute applications to our AWS servers. One of the problems with any Kubernetes distribution is: well,... more »

  • How GIPHY’s Public API Integrates with gRPC Services

    August 13, 2020 by Serhii Kushch

    We always work hard at GIPHY to help people find the right GIF at the right time. Adoption of gRPC helps us continue to keep our services fast, stable, and fault-tolerant as we scale to over 10 billion pieces of... more »

  • Fixing Bugs in FFMPEG GIF Encoding

    July 23, 2020 by Jacob Graff

    Here at GIPHY Engineering, we frequently use FFmpeg to resize and reformat GIFs. We generate around 40 different renditions for each GIF uploaded to our platform, so it’s important we do so as efficiently as we can. While FFmpeg is... more »

  • Modifying FFMPEG to Support Transparent GIFs

    July 9, 2020 by Bjorn Roche

    A sticker (left) is just a GIF (right) with transparent pixels. Here at GIPHY, we differentiate between GIFs and Stickers in our business language, as the two products are served to different searches and customers. However, we still use the... more »

  • How we made FastText faster

    April 24, 2020 by Taras Shevchenko

    FastText is a library for efficient text classification and representation learning. Like its sibling, Word2Vec, it produces meaningful word embeddings from a given corpus of text. Unlike its sibling, FastText uses n-grams for word representations, making it great for text-classification... more »

  • GIPHY SDK: The Grid

    April 15, 2020 by Chris Maier

    A GIF feature in your app can increase engagement and give your users a valuable new way to express themselves, but building it can be hard!  You have to figure out how and where to get the content, design and... more »

  • Engaging Endpoints: 4 Ways to Supplement GIF search

    April 1, 2020 by GIPHY

    We’d like to highlight four public API endpoints designed to increase engagement and create better user experiences for products and projects integrating GIPHY. At GIPHY, we use these endpoints to help users discover content and as ancillary features for our... more »

  • #BuildforCOVID19 Global Online Hackathon

    March 27, 2020 by GIPHY

    We’ve joined Facebook and many other partners such as Microsoft, Pinterest, Slack, TikTok, Twitter, and WeChat to support and participate in the #BuildforCOVID19 Online Hackathon — a new global hackathon to tackle the challenges and problems related to the current coronavirus... more »

  • Elasticsearch: Custom Analysis

    March 2, 2020 by Utah Ingersoll

    GIPHY uses Elasticsearch to deliver all the best GIFs. Elasticsearch is an extremely fast, open source search engine supported by a great community. It has a robust Query API which allows us to quickly iterate our search algorithm. The Mapping... more »

  • Pupline: GIPHY’s Media Metadata Pipeline

    October 29, 2019 by Jacob Graff

    Here at GIPHY, we receive thousands of GIF uploads each day. Like any tech company, we love data: we want to attach as much data as we can to these GIFs so that we can improve their search performance and... more »

  • GIPHY Gets Tagged by K-Nearest Neighbors

    October 16, 2019 by Alice Phan

    When a brand new GIF gets uploaded onto GIPHY.com, there’s usually not a lot of data associated with it to make sure that it’s discoverable via search. While we do rely on machine learning for tag generation, we also allow... more »

  • What’s that Spike?

    August 13, 2019 by Alex Anderson

    Weekly Search Trends at GIPHY The Product Analytics team at GIPHY sits at the interface of technical data engineering teams and the rest of our business. We’re tasked with making data easily accessible across the org and uncovering insights to... more »

  • Fixing Django Fixtures

    July 2, 2019 by Chris Hranj

    Here at GIPHY we have a lot of services. These services vary in language, visibility, and scale.  Since I started a few months ago, I’ve been working on a newer internal service called Bouncer. Bouncer is a CMS built on... more »

  • Introducing the New and Improved GIPHY SDK

    June 26, 2019 by GIPHY

    Today, we’re announcing our new and improved GIPHY SDK, the fastest and easiest way to integrate the world’s most-loved GIF library — and the full GIPHY experience — into your app for free. Built with developers and product designers in mind,... more »

  • Who is GIPHY Engineering?

    May 21, 2019 by GIPHY

    As GIPHY Engineering continues to grow, we thought it was important to take a step back and have a conversation about what it means to be a GIPHY Engineer. The goal wasn’t to create a spreadsheet with all the prototypical... more »

  • Luigi the 10x Plumber: Containerizing & Scaling Luigi in Kubernetes

    May 14, 2019 by Walter Menendez

    Here at GIPHY, we love data. We love it because it lets us make data-driven decisions that improve the quality of results our users get from our search engine. The more search traffic on GIPHY, the more insight we have... more »

  • Practical AI Podcast: GIPHY’s Celebrity Detector

    April 19, 2019 by GIPHY

    GIPHY Engineering’s head of R&D, Nick Hasty, joined the Practical AI Podcast to discuss the recently released Celebrity Detector. In the episode, Nick shares more details about the project, and also sheds some light on GIPHY’s origins, AI at GIPHY... more »

  • GIPHY Engineering Celebrates Women’s History Month!

    March 7, 2019 by GIPHY

    March is Women’s History Month! For this year’s special month, GIPHY Engineering is celebrating with a whole new sticker pack dedicated to Women Pioneers in STEM. All stickers were illustrated and brought to life by the amazing Denyse Mitterhofer, and... more »

  • GIPHY’s AI Can Identify Lil’ Yachty, Can Yours?

    March 5, 2019 by Nick Hasty

    GIPHY is excited to announce the public availability of our custom machine learning model, The GIPHY Celebrity Detector, which is able to discern over 2,300 celebrity faces with 98% accuracy. The model was trained to identify the most popular celebs... more »

  • gRPC Adoption in GIPHY

    December 11, 2018 by Nima Khoshini

    GIPHY’s API servers handle over a million requests a minute. To handle this load, we divide the work between a variety of microservices, each of which fulfills part of the request. For example, one service performs searches, another supplies metadata... more »

  • How to increase performances on custom UICollectionsViewLayout

    November 2, 2018 by Giorgia Marenda

    GIPHY’s iOS app grid design includes a particular layout called the “Waterfall Layout.”It allows differentsized GIFs and Stickers to fit together in a continuous steam.An issue with this kind of layout is that we need to dynamically calculate the frame-size... more »

  • Giphy Android App and Fresco

    September 27, 2018 by Cristian Holdunu

    GIPHY’s Android team recently released our third major version of the GIPHY app. In the latest release, we focused on delivering new features, redesigning the home page to support GIPHY Stories, and improving our app’s performance. We also delivered an... more »

  • Contextually-Aware Search: GIPHY Gets Work-Specific

    September 4, 2018 by Zachary Hay

    GIPHY has popular integrations on many platforms like Facebook Messenger, Twitter, and Slack. We serve tens of billions of requests a month to all integrations via our API. Users search our industry-leading database of GIFs and stickers to find the... more »

  • Building GIPHY’s Extension for Twitch

    August 21, 2018 by Nick Santaniello

    We’re super excited about the recent launch of our GIPHY extension for Twitch! Twitch has put a lot of and work and attention to detail into creating their Extensions platform and we’re excited to be a part of it. If... more »

  • Doing it Live at GIPHY (with AVFoundation)

    July 27, 2018 by Andy Hin

    At GIPHY, we create a lot of GIFs from live broadcasts –- TV shows, world events, sports games, and more.   One of the tools we use to do this is GIPHY Capture – a MacOS app that lets you easily record... more »

  • GIPHY Dancing Stickers are all the Hype(r)

    April 20, 2018 by Jonny McLaughlin

    Mission Make this jazz corn dance across my terminal window whenever I deploy code via Github. Introduction I’ve been using Hyper, a terminal emulator built with Javascript, for a while now and I love it. It’s built with React, which... more »

  • How to make GIFs with FFMPEG

    March 29, 2018 by Collin Burger

    INTRODUCTION To follow along, download media files here: https://github.com/cyburgee/ffmpeg-guide If you’ve worked with media encoding in the past decade it’s likely that you’ve come across FFmpeg. For those of you who are unfamiliar, in their words: “FFmpeg is the leading... more »

  • Scaling Redshift without Scaling Costs

    March 6, 2018 by Niger Little-Poole

    Drowning in Data Interactions with GIPHY via our apps and API network are generating 3+ billion events a day. Over the years we’ve built and maintained infrastructure to process and analyze all this data to improve our search algorithm, power... more »

  • Getting Started With Artificial Intelligence

    February 27, 2018 by Nick Hasty

    Artificial Intelligence, also known as AI, is a hot topic these days and at GIPHY this is no foreign term. We work with Google Cloud’s machine learning tools on multiple levels, but ultimately to help you search. To dive deeper... more »

  • How Video Formats Work

    January 31, 2018 by Bjorn Roche

    Introduction In my presentation on GIFs, I focused on how GIFs work and how GIFs compare to modern image formats. Let’s look a bit at modern video formats and see how they compress data. Here at GIPHY, we obviously work... more »

  • Scaling GIF Data Storage to Infinity and Beyond!

    January 23, 2018 by Nima Khoshini

    Introduction Everyday here at GIPHY, we have GIFs on GIFs on GIFs uploaded to our platform. In fact, we serve over three billion GIFs a day (that’s a lot of dancing cats!) to over 300 million daily active users. Every... more »

  • Introducing a new look for GIPHY Engineering

    January 17, 2018 by GIPHY

    Technology is changing the way we communicate and the way we communicate is driving innovation in technology. GIPHY Engineering is revolutionizing both – when words don’t cut it, say it with GIPHY. Follow us on Twitter @GIPHYENG for all the... more »

  • Debugging Memory Leaks in Swift’s Enumerations Data Type

    January 11, 2018 by Cem Kozinoglu

    Background We have been working on developing the GIPHY Core SDK for the open source community & 3rd party developers. So, if they’re developing an iOS or macOS app, they can easily integrate GIPHY search, trending topics, trending GIFs, Stickers,... more »

  • Enhancing GIPHY Search with Google Cloud ML Tools

    December 8, 2017 by Nick Hasty

    Editor’s Note: Earlier this week our Director of Engineering, Nick Hasty, was a guest author on the Google Cloud Big Data and ML blog. Nick touched on the use of Google Cloud Machine Learning to analyze and tag our GIFs,... more »

  • The Making of a GIF Music Video

    December 1, 2017 by Bjorn Roche

    When singer/songwriter Cassandra Kubinski recently visited the GIPHY office, she got inspired and thought of the idea to create a music video made entirely of GIFs. We weren’t sure if this had ever been done before, but it didn’t really... more »

  • Beyond Content: Extracting Image Property Data from GIFs

    October 24, 2017 by Ruben Stern

    For my summer internship on the GIPHY engineering team, I was tasked with extracting image property data from GIFs. Image property data is metadata about the GIF files themselves, particularly attributes that affect human perception and image “quality”, as opposed... more »

  • GIPHY <3 Analytics

    October 10, 2017 by Niger Little-Poole

    Data Science and Analytics are an important part of what makes GIPHY the best place to find GIFs. We recently teamed up with Interana to help them spread the message of good data analytics practices during their “Summer Data Love... more »

  • Introducing GIPHY Developers

    October 4, 2017 by Nick Santaniello

    We’re excited to announce the launch of GIPHY Developers: a one-stop shop and interactive resource for developers interested in getting started with GIPHY’s API offerings! By visiting our new portal, aspiring GIPHY developers can read top-level guides as well as... more »

  • New Stickers API Available

    September 28, 2017 by Nick Santaniello

    Okay hotshot, you may know what a GIF is, but how about a Sticker? Give up? A Sticker is an animated GIF with a transparent background, making them the perfect choice for use in presentations, to be dropped into your... more »

  • The GIPHY SDK is now Open Source

    September 27, 2017 by GIPHY

    In this week's news at GIPHY we are announcing the open-sourcing of the GIPHY SDK. This is the same code that powers some of our own products and will make integrating the GIPHY API even simpler. Available for iOS, Android... more »

  • GIPHY Search Gets Glasses

    September 26, 2017 by Bethany Davis

    Hey! My name is Bethany and I was a software engineering intern on the Search team this summer. I was also a 2017 hackNY fellow. I study computer science at the University of Pennsylvania. In this post, I discuss my... more »

  • GIPHY Capture: Lessons Learned From Flux

    September 20, 2017 by Mike Nolan

    Jumping into native app development from a web development background can be a monumental task for many. The web development community provides an incredible and seemingly endless supply of resources, free and open source tooling, packages and frameworks to help... more »

  • GIFS: Why do They Look Like That?

    August 30, 2017 by Bjorn Roche

    Here at GIPHY we work with GIFs every day. Sometimes, however, it pays to stop and ask “What exactly is a GIF?”. Since the format is over thirty years old, it has some real limitations, so it is worth asking:... more »

  • Building Pex with Pants in Production

    August 9, 2017 by Fiona Condon

    GIPHY’s search analytics team has one of the coolest jobs in the world—getting data about the way the world uses GIFs and using that data to make it easier to find the best cat fail. To make this happen, we... more »

  • GIF Paint: Drawing GIFs on Canvas

    August 2, 2017 by Jonny McLaughlin

    What was once intended to simply be a fun internal hack day project for GIPHY Maker’s Fair eventually turned into an actualized tool, better known as GIF Paint. We had a hack day here where we (GIPHY employees) were split... more »

  • Introducing GIPHY Engineering

    July 21, 2017 by Randy Shepherd

    Welcome to our new GIPHY Engineering blog! We’ll be using this platform to share stories from GIPHY’s technical teams – the folks who build, run and enhance all of our products, tools and infrastructure. First up, lets talk through what... more »