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 a…

[image] Eros: Isn’t there an open source alternative? 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 c…

[image] Simon: sending the gif its send as a file and not as a link to giphy 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 oppos…

[image] Eros: would send a “link” containing the GIF (in the chat interface it would show the GIF and not the link) 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…

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. :wink: :+1:t2:

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 delt…

My kids really would love to send GIFs via the desktop app :wink: 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 …

An imperfect workaround is to save those GIFs you often use to a directory that is synchronized between your phone and desktop. That’s what I do. I have a Nextcloud directory that contains Tenor GIFs that I use often.

I’m inclined to think that this would be a job for a third party app, like it is with emoji pickers.

Search GIF in chat

Feature Proposal

ian August 18, 2026, 9:47pm 12

This is how Signal implements a privacy-preserving way to proxy giphy requests: