Inferring Creativity
February 7, 2024 9:45 pm by Bjorn Roche
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 interview on YouTube, or listen to the podcast on Spotify.
From GIFs To Git: Learning to Code & Debugging Self Doubt
November 1, 2023 7:36 pm 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 2:04 pm 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 in mind, identifying search terms that may indicate that a person is struggling helps us […]
How do I stay effective as a software engineer?
July 12, 2022 5:00 pm by Sixuan Liu
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
May 5, 2022 1:27 pm 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. green screen) in real-time.
Giphy SDK: Bridging Native SDKs in React Native
November 17, 2021 3:06 pm 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 7:02 pm 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 ramp up in the role, I spent hours reading all the documentation of the various […]
How GIPHY uses Fastly to Achieve Global Scale
April 20, 2021 3:23 pm 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 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
March 18, 2021 10:00 am 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, etc.) that we surface. However, sometimes what you want a GIF to say is quite […]
GIPHY2Vec: Natural Language Processing @ GIPHY
February 26, 2021 9:21 pm 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 on Betaworks Studios’ Event Calendar.
Part 2: Computer Vision @ GIPHY: How we Created an AutoTagging Model Using Deep Learning
January 11, 2021 5:43 pm 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 related approaches. Additionally, we described the training and evaluation data we have at hand and […]
GIPHY Search Trends During the 2020 Presidential Election
December 14, 2020 8:23 pm 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) 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
December 3, 2020 7:42 pm 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 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
October 28, 2020 7:00 am 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, that sometimes text is important to contextualize visual media. This led the way to the […]
Spinnaker @ GIPHY
August 28, 2020 4:22 pm 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, the distribution. There is an amalgamation of tools out there vying for your attention (and, […]
How GIPHY’s Public API Integrates with gRPC Services
August 13, 2020 9:37 pm 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 content a day. When the GIPHY API, which serves content to our third party integrations, […]
Fixing Bugs in FFMPEG GIF Encoding
July 23, 2020 6:06 pm 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 powerful, it was designed for processing MP4 files, and its support for the GIF format […]
Modifying FFMPEG to Support Transparent GIFs
July 9, 2020 9:26 pm 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 GIF format to store stickers – all they really are is GIFs with transparent pixels. […]
How we made FastText faster
April 24, 2020 4:25 pm 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 projects like language detection, sentiment analysis, and topic modeling. Here at GIPHY, we use FastText […]
GIPHY SDK: The Grid
April 15, 2020 5:33 pm 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 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
April 1, 2020 7:16 pm 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 core GIF search experience — as we know a blank search input on a platform […]
#BuildforCOVID19 Global Online Hackathon
March 27, 2020 8:30 pm 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 (COVID-19) pandemic. We want to encourage you – our global developer community – to join […]
Elasticsearch: Custom Analysis
March 2, 2020 8:49 pm 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 API enables us to prototype new signals and account for the quirks in GIF metadata. […]
Pupline: GIPHY’s Media Metadata Pipeline
October 29, 2019 5:07 pm 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 the user experience. We also want to do so in an organized, centralized, and asynchronous […]
GIPHY Gets Tagged by K-Nearest Neighbors
October 16, 2019 3:14 pm 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 uploading users and GIPHY’s content team to manually add “tags”, which are keywords that help […]
What’s that Spike?
August 13, 2019 7:34 pm 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 enhance our product and sales strategies. This can take the form of building data visualizations, […]
Fixing Django Fixtures
July 2, 2019 9:11 pm 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 top of the Django framework and primarily talks to another internal Scala service. When I […]
Introducing the New and Improved GIPHY SDK
June 26, 2019 10:00 am 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, our SDK is the best way to get direct access to GIFs, stickers, and new […]
Who is GIPHY Engineering?
May 21, 2019 9:34 pm 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 attributes of the perfect engineer, but instead to understand a bit more about ourselves as […]
Luigi the 10x Plumber: Containerizing & Scaling Luigi in Kubernetes
May 14, 2019 8:07 pm 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 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
April 19, 2019 9:52 pm 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 and more! Check out the episode below: Practical AI 38: GIPHY’s celebrity detector – Listen […]
GIPHY Engineering Celebrates Women’s History Month!
March 7, 2019 11:15 pm 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 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?
March 5, 2019 5:11 pm 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 on GIPHY, and can identify and make predictions for multiple faces across a sequence of […]
gRPC Adoption in GIPHY
December 11, 2018 8:54 pm 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 about GIFs, yet another validates user credentials, and so on. Our first iteration of microservices […]
How to increase performances on custom UICollectionsViewLayout
November 2, 2018 8:29 pm 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 of every cell because we don’t know what the height of the GIF will be […]
Giphy Android App and Fresco
September 27, 2018 4:35 pm 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 entirely new set of GIF creation tools! Behind these front-facing features for our users, we […]
Contextually-Aware Search: GIPHY Gets Work-Specific
September 4, 2018 1:46 pm 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 perfect one to send in all of these messaging platforms. GIPHY’s search engine calculates CTR […]
Building GIPHY’s Extension for Twitch
August 21, 2018 9:00 pm 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 you’ve used GIPHY on Slack, GIPHY for Twitch works in much the same way except […]
Doing it Live at GIPHY (with AVFoundation)
July 27, 2018 6:55 pm 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 your screen. Click to record, and click again to stop. Easy! But one unique […]
GIPHY Dancing Stickers are all the Hype(r)
April 20, 2018 9:23 am 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 is the same technology that powers the front-end of GIPHY.com. It’s very customizable and, with […]
How to make GIFs with FFMPEG
March 29, 2018 12:00 pm 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 multimedia framework, able to decode, encode, transcode, mux, demux, stream, filter and play pretty much […]
Scaling Redshift without Scaling Costs
March 6, 2018 5:11 pm 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 our view counts, identify cultural trends, and much more. Today we rely on a combination […]
Getting Started With Artificial Intelligence
February 27, 2018 12:13 pm 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 into this topic, we sat down with James Maguire from Datamation to provide insight on […]
How Video Formats Work
January 31, 2018 5:21 pm 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 a lot with the GIF format, but you might be surprised to learn that we […]
Scaling GIF Data Storage to Infinity and Beyond!
January 23, 2018 8:07 pm 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 upload, however, brings new information and an increasingly large amount of data—this can become a […]
Introducing a new look for GIPHY Engineering
January 17, 2018 5:56 pm 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 exciting GIPHY Engineering updates!
Debugging Memory Leaks in Swift’s Enumerations Data Type
January 11, 2018 5:16 pm 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, etc. directly into their apps without needing to re-invent the wheel. We decided to use […]
Enhancing GIPHY Search with Google Cloud ML Tools
December 8, 2017 6:44 pm 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, ultimately making it easier to find the perfect GIF on GIPHY. The following blog post […]
Beyond Content: Extracting Image Property Data from GIFs
October 24, 2017 7:37 pm 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 to content-related metadata. GIPHY can then use this data to do things like build predictive […]
GIPHY <3 Analytics
October 10, 2017 4:30 pm 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 Roadshow”. I answered questions from New York area Data Scientists, Product Managers, CEOs, etc along […]
The GIPHY SDK is now Open Source
September 27, 2017 7:47 pm 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 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
September 26, 2017 10:00 am 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 internship project: leveraging optical character recognition (OCR) to help you find the perfect GIF. At […]
Introducing GIPHY Engineering
July 21, 2017 6:18 pm 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 we do. We power GIFs everywhere. Whenever you see a GIF (whether on a social […]