This might sound silly but I really do miss sending gifs. I think it gives lighthearted fun. However I do not want to use giphy or tenor api I would rather have a bunch of gifs self hosted and accessible on my home server.
Matrix has their sticker solution but from what I have gathered they can see that data in your chats. You can get a gif plugin but I am sure matrix and giphy can see your requests with it as well.
My solution as of right now is trying to host immich and having a gif album that is accessible by my users. Reason being is the ai may prove to be useful when searching for the perfect gif/reaction. I have ran into a problem though, I have no idea how to batch download gifs from giphy and tenor. It seems people don’t just share their gif collections all willy nilly like they do memes.
Is this the best solution? How would you go about self hosting such a service?
(And if you have large amounts of gifs… Can I have some 👉👈 🥺)
Sorry for the silly request for help 😂
Thank you all so much.
Giphy has a documented API that you could use. There have been bulk downloaders, but I didn’t see any that had recent activity. However you still might be able to use one to model your own script after, like https://github.com/jcpsimmons/giphy-stacks
There were downloaders for Gfycat - gallery-dl supported it at one point - but it’s down now. However you might be able to find collections that other people downloaded and are now hosting. You could also use the Internet Archive - they have tools and APIs documented
There’s a Tenor mass downloader that uses the Tenor API and an API key that you provide.
Imgur has GIFs is supported by gallery-dl, so that’s an option.
Also, read over https://github.com/simon987/awesome-datahoarding - there may be something useful for you there.
In terms of hosting, it would depend on my user base and if I want users to be able to upload GIFs, too. If it was just my close friends, then Immich would probably be fine, but if we had people I didn’t know directly using it, I’d want a more refined solution.
There’s Gifable, which is pretty focused, but looks like it has a pretty small following. I haven’t used it myself to see how suitable it is. If you self-host it (or something else that uses S3), note that you can use MinIO or LocalStack for the S3 container rather than using AWS directly. I’m using MinIO as part of my stack now, though for a completely different app.
MediaCMS is another option. Less focused on GIFs but more actively developed, and intended to be used for this sort of purpose.