GIPHY: The GIF Search Engine

GIPHY is at least one of, if not THE best place to find gifs. It’s servers contain a huge selection of the world’s gif-image cultural heritage. It’s very important. BUT the access is inconsistent. On a bad GIPHY day, if you scroll more than two thumb-swipes down any search, be prepared for endless rows of bright GIPHY brand squares and loading spiral animations. It’s pretty consistently a problem across multiple devices, even in places with lightning fast download speeds and plenty of bandwidth. In other words, this is definitely an issue with the app itself. Also, their search algorithm is must be pretty vague. It’s difficult to find something specific, even if you put in plenty of good search terms. Most people will download the app anyway. I would even recommend they do so, but be aware that the GIPHY app is not consistently functional from one day to another.

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UPDATE: The response I got from customer support was to delete and redownload the app which has been the “solution” every time this has happened. I’m dropping my rating from a 4 to a 2 as this is not an acceptable “resolution” to an issue that happens with almost every single update. After the app is updated the icon in the keyboard (messages app, etc) turns into a little white icon. This is the only app that I’ve had this issue with and while it is nothing more than a cosmetic issue as of now, the point still stands that this shouldn’t happen almost EVERY update. Original Review: This is by far my favorite gif app out there. My only problem with it is that it seems like every other update that gets pushed out breaks the keyboard function of the app in messages. I’m not the only one that has this issue. I’ve got a few family members and friends who also see this same issue. Already emailed support and will gladly update my review if this issue gets resolved but like I said it seems like every other update this happens.

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Faster way to SEARCH and share, yes! Fastest way to SAVE and share, no! There are too many gifs here. That’s actually a marvelous thing! Except there are no folders to organize them. I don’t have the time or care to sift through a hundred “clapping” gifs to find the one I like each time. So I save it to favorites. Great! But then I have a gif for EVERY reaction, and often a dozen PER reaction type (gotta have fandom reactions and plain reactions and celebrity reactions, etc). So if we could just create folders in our favorites so I don’t have to scroll through 500 gifs every time I’m looking for the perfect Star Trek or sports or reaction gif, I’d give you two more stars. This is 2019. If you can’t give us folders already, you lose three stars on the rating. Keeping us scrolling through so many gifs in our favorites drains our batteries and wastes our data. Someone please hook us up with folders! Everything else about this app is pretty darn great, 5-star worthy, even.

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I use this app multiple times a day, but it pulls so much memory that it is becoming unusable. This app is in no way streamlined for heavy users. I've saved almost 1000 gifs as favorites, but there are no playlists, no rapid scrolling, so personal tagging features, so all of them appear as one giant list. The scrolling system is just broken. I have to wait for each gif to load before I can scroll to an earlier part of the list. I've spent 20 minutes just trying to get to the gif I need, even when I know exactly what and where it is. The app worked great when I had 10 favorites, now I'm lucky if I get through 1/10 of my favorites before it crashes. In some cases I have to quit every other app on my phone, then restart the phone, just to use the basic functions of this app. I would switch to a different app in a second if it actually worked. They need to fire their entire UX team and find someone actually competent at the job.

I’m on an iPhone X with iOS 13.3. For some time now, I’ve noticed that when using the GIPHY keyboard to send texts (by just tapping the GIF image you want to use, and allowing it to automatically add the image to your text message), the animation-speed of the GIF that gets sent is noticeably slower that what the GIPHY keyboard showed, and the sent GIF usually ends several frames too soon. The only way I’ve found to send GIPHYs that play back at regular speed is to open the GIPHY *app*, and from there, I have the option to save a GIF to my camera roll. THEN I can go to my camera roll and attach THAT saved GIF to a text message. It’s a few extra hoops to jump through, which is why I deducted a couple stars. As far as being able to quickly find appropriate and funny GIFs for my needs, it’s great.