danielpickett/giphy

A search interface for Giphy that's better for saving gifs to your desktop

This app is LIVE on GitHub pages: https://danielpickett.github.io/giphy.

Overview

This is a clone of the Giphy website using Giphy's own API to enable search of gifs from their database. I did this project because we started using Slack at work and the Giphy integration for Slack is terrible. Previously, we used Stride by Atlassian which had a pretty decent Giphy integration that showed a side panel with Giphy search and displayed a scrollable panel of results. Slack just shows one gif at a time and has a "shuffle" button to show the next gif if you don't like the first one. I tried using the Giphy website, but that didn't allow me to drag gifs from Chrome onto my desktop. Instead, dragging gifs from giphy.com just saved a url link. So I made this app to return actual gif files that can be dragged to the desktop and then onto Slack.

Important Compatibility Note

This app works great in Chrome, but in Firefox and Edge there's an issue (I'm not even checking IE). I think it's related to my use of window.stop(). When the little plus sign (+) button is clicked for the lightbox, all the gifs stop animating. It appears that in Firefox and Edge, window.stop() not only stops the loading of queued gifs, it also stops the animation of fully loaded gifs, and it never restarts them.