Searching for GIFs is a feature widely present in many modern messengers and makes use more personal and fun.
Delta Chat has support for playback by GIFs, but there is no search engine within the chat. The request is that you have this search engine for users to use with greater convenience.
you mean we should call giphy to get GIFs?
I don’t like this approach because it introduces a connection to a non-free thirdparty service.
On android and on ios you can download keyboard apps that can search and insert gifs.
Yes, I understand and agree. Even more so now that Facebook has acquired GIPHY.
Isn’t there an open source alternative? Or connecting to the service through a proxy would solve the problem.
Most keyboards are closed-source and those with GIF search connect directly to these services; my question about this is whether it represents a potential problem for the Delta Chat side?
I haven’t searched for one yet so I don’t know, even if we find one:
I’m unsure about copyrighted material in gif, facebook has a big legal department to solve copyright issues and a small community run project probably won’t have the capacity to deal with getting sued because somebody uploaded copyrighted material. But maybe short gifs fall under fair use and as such don’t fall under copyright.
Its gif collection won’t be as big as the collection of giphy
No because what the user installs/uses on their device is not deltachats responsibility and on sending the gif its send as a file and not as a link to giphy so the receiver isn’t forced to contact giphy’s servers at all. 
As I understand it, if there was a search engine in Delta, from the moment the user clicks on a GIF they would send a “link” containing the GIF (in the chat interface it would show the GIF and not the link); as opposed to using a keyboard that would send a file.
It makes perfect sense. I understand the decision better!
no i was unclear, we would send the gif and not link there too. the problem is including the giphy sdk in deltachat and calling giphy from deltachat.
At-least the f-droid folks and our privacy & security enthusiastic users won’t like that at all.
If you use a seperate keyboard app its not deltachat that contacts giphy, its the keyboard app.
But as this is a small feature one could fork deltachat and add this feature, but I still believe a gif keyboard is the best solution to this problem.
I understand. Weighing the pros and cons, it makes no sense to include a gif search engine. Animated stickers are a more interesting feature and can replace a gif. Thanks for the answers. 
Is it possible to merely define an interface instead? lets say I have my own gif provider proxy/gateway/whatever - if I could just give that url to deltachat and implement a specific interface on the server end, then I am free to fill it with whatever I want (could even have a list servers, and deltachat app could aggregate the results based on media digests).
In fact, perhaps the interface can be borrowed from / based on giphy’s even, that way the giphy API link can be set as the provider at the user’s discretion (if there is a sane way to dynamically insert api key etc).
My kids really would love to send GIFs via the desktop app
I’m thinking about extending the EmojiAndStickerPicker with a gif feature.
The obvious (and already mentioned) problem is privacy protection, because we would need to access some external api (e.g. giphy or tenor.com) to be able to search.
The easiest way to solve this is to ask for consent before allowing the user to use the remote gif-search. So we could ask the user “Do you want to access the external giphy api?”.
A more user friendly approach would be to allow the user to define a gif-search-server in the settings. If no server is defined gif search is simply not supported. These gif-servers could be quite simple and proxy requests to one of the gif-providers.
What do you think?