Making the internet a better place

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 in mind, identifying search terms that may indicate that a person is struggling helps us […]

How do I stay effective as a software engineer?

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 use to maintain their productivity; thankfully, they tend to display similar patterns. In this short […]

Real-Time iOS Camera Video Matting via CoreML

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. green screen) in real-time.

Giphy SDK: Bridging Native SDKs in React Native

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

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 ramp up in the role, I spent hours reading all the documentation of the various […]

How GIPHY uses Fastly to Achieve Global Scale

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 to use in their products, which gives their users access to our enormous library. As […]

GIPHY Text is Now Live in Our SDK and Chrome Extensions

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, etc.) that we surface.  However, sometimes what you want a GIF to say is quite […]

GIPHY2Vec: Natural Language Processing @ GIPHY

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 on Betaworks Studios’ Event Calendar.

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

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 related approaches. Additionally, we described the training and evaluation data we have at hand and […]

GIPHY Search Trends During the 2020 Presidential Election

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) require resources across the company — from our Editorial team “live-GIFing” video feeds in real-time […]

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

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 improve their quality with both manual and automated verification. However, for the last couple of […]

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

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, that sometimes text is important to contextualize visual media. This led the way to the […]

Spinnaker @ GIPHY

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, the distribution. There is an amalgamation of tools out there vying for your attention (and, […]

How GIPHY’s Public API Integrates with gRPC Services

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 content a day. When the GIPHY API, which serves content to our third party integrations, […]

Fixing Bugs in FFMPEG GIF Encoding

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 powerful, it was designed for processing MP4 files, and its support for the GIF format […]

Modifying FFMPEG to Support Transparent GIFs

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 GIF format to store stickers – all they really are is GIFs with transparent pixels. […]

How we made FastText faster

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 projects like language detection, sentiment analysis, and topic modeling.  Here at GIPHY, we use FastText […]

GIPHY SDK: The Grid

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 implement a UI, test, iterate…the list goes on.  That’s why we built the GIPHY SDK, […]

Engaging Endpoints: 4 Ways to Supplement GIF search

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 core GIF search experience — as we know a blank search input on a platform […]

#BuildforCOVID19 Global Online Hackathon

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 (COVID-19) pandemic. We want to encourage you – our global developer community – to join […]

Elasticsearch: Custom Analysis

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 API enables us to prototype new signals and account for the quirks in GIF metadata. […]

Pupline: GIPHY’s Media Metadata Pipeline

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 the user experience. We also want to do so in an organized, centralized, and asynchronous […]

GIPHY Gets Tagged by K-Nearest Neighbors

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 uploading users and GIPHY’s content team to manually add “tags”, which are keywords that help […]

What’s that Spike?

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 enhance our product and sales strategies. This can take the form of building data visualizations, […]

Fixing Django Fixtures

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 top of the Django framework and primarily talks to another internal Scala service. When I […]

Introducing the New and Improved GIPHY SDK

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, our SDK is the best way to get direct access to GIFs, stickers, and new […]

Who is GIPHY Engineering?

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 attributes of the perfect engineer, but instead to understand a bit more about ourselves as […]

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

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 into what’s popular and trending. We use these insights/signals to fine-tune search results we serve […]

Practical AI Podcast: GIPHY’s Celebrity Detector

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 and more! Check out the episode below: Practical AI 38: GIPHY’s celebrity detector – Listen […]

GIPHY Engineering Celebrates Women’s History Month!

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 you can find them on GIPHY.com, the GIPHY mobile app and anywhere you get your […]

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

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 on GIPHY, and can identify and make predictions for multiple faces across a sequence of […]

gRPC Adoption in GIPHY

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 about GIFs, yet another validates user credentials, and so on. Our first iteration of microservices […]

How to increase performances on custom UICollectionsViewLayout

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 of every cell because we don’t know what the height of the GIF will be […]

Giphy Android App and Fresco

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 entirely  new set of GIF creation tools! Behind these front-facing features for our users, we […]

Contextually-Aware Search: GIPHY Gets Work-Specific

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 perfect one to send in all of these messaging platforms. GIPHY’s search engine calculates CTR […]

Building GIPHY’s Extension for Twitch

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 you’ve used GIPHY on Slack, GIPHY for Twitch works in much the same way except […]

Doing it Live at GIPHY (with AVFoundation)

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 your screen. Click to record, and click again to stop. Easy!   But one unique […]

GIPHY Dancing Stickers are all the Hype(r)

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 is the same technology that powers the front-end of GIPHY.com. It’s very customizable and, with […]

How to make GIFs with FFMPEG

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 multimedia framework, able to decode, encode, transcode, mux, demux, stream, filter and play pretty much […]

Scaling Redshift without Scaling Costs

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 our view counts, identify cultural trends, and much more. Today we rely on a combination […]

Getting Started With Artificial Intelligence

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 into this topic, we sat down with James Maguire from Datamation to provide insight on […]

How Video Formats Work

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 a lot with the GIF format, but you might be surprised to learn that we […]

Scaling GIF Data Storage to Infinity and Beyond!

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 upload, however, brings new information and an increasingly large amount of data—this can become a […]

Debugging Memory Leaks in Swift’s Enumerations Data Type

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, etc. directly into their apps without needing to re-invent the wheel. We decided to use […]

Enhancing GIPHY Search with Google Cloud ML Tools

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, ultimately making it easier to find the perfect GIF on GIPHY. The following blog post […]

The Making of a GIF Music Video

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 matter – it sounded too fun not to try it ourselves. Cassandra has a great […]

Beyond Content: Extracting Image Property Data from GIFs

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 to content-related metadata. GIPHY can then use this data to do things like build predictive […]

GIPHY <3 Analytics

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 Roadshow”. I answered questions from New York area Data Scientists, Product Managers, CEOs, etc along […]

Introducing GIPHY Developers

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 detailed technical documentation regarding the GIPHY API’s many endpoints. It’s easier than ever to get […]

New Stickers API Available

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 favorite messaging app via the official GIPHY mobile app, or even to spruce up your […]

The GIPHY SDK is now Open Source

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 and various other programming languages, the code can be found on GIthub under the Mozilla Public License, v. 2.0. Where applicable, binaries are published to public repositories.

GIPHY Search Gets Glasses

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 internship project: leveraging optical character recognition (OCR) to help you find the perfect GIF. At […]

GIPHY Capture: Lessons Learned From Flux

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 even intermediate developers build scalable and maintainable interfaces. Given the ubiquitous nature of the web […]

GIFS: Why do They Look Like That?

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: “What are they? What does it do well? And what can’t it do?

The GIF format has a distinctive look, one that we at GIPHY are familiar with. Watch this talk to learn more about how we examine why GIFs look the way they do and a lot more….

Building Pex with Pants in Production

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 write ETLs in Scala with Spark and manage them with a Python-based task management tool […]

GIF Paint: Drawing GIFs on Canvas

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 into pods and spent time building GIF related tools which were then presented to GIPHY […]

Introducing GIPHY Engineering

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 we do. We power GIFs everywhere. Whenever you see a GIF (whether on a social […]