Selfhosted @lemmy.world ludicolo @lemmy.ml 2 wk. ago

Self hostable gif database?

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.

30 comments

https://github.com/pietvanzoen/gifable
- Lemmy wouldn't let me post it 😭
  
  https://media4.giphy.com/media/okLCopqw6ElCDnIhuS/giphy.gif?cid=6c09b952f50sg86gimzwzek5coa6ecqatmww8m12ta0kfltv&ep=v1_internal_gif_by_id&rid=giphy.gif&ct=g
Can't wait until this guy DDoS's his home connection and his ISP calls wondering why tf his bandwidth skyrocketed overnight because of hotlinkers.
- OP can use a Cloudflare tunnel which would take care of caching and prevent any accidental DDoS attacks.
  
  https://media1.tenor.com/m/y7YaTci5Z4gAAAAd/two-steps-ahead-nikocado.gif
Matrix has their sticker solution but from what I have gathered they can see that data in your chats.

What gives you that idea?

As for options, I searched giphy scraper and got a bunch of options on GitHub. Have you looked at those?
- I had read somewhere that matrix can see integration data like sticker packs. So while they cannot read the content of your encrypted messages they can see what stickers you are sending and reacting with.
  
  I did not look extensively into a giphy scraper. I used different terminology that probably confused the search engine 🤦 couldn't think of the word. Thank you I will look into it.
  
  iirc it's the reason Signal didn't have gifs was the data leakage from them
Couldn't you use immich for this?
- Thats the route I was potentially looking at.
...ok I know I always recommend dokuwiki for everything but it is super easy to set up and doesn't need a database or anything and it comes stock with a nice gui media manager and a lot of plugins that extend that functionality.

If you are willing to provide or pay for the hosting of a large amount of images I don't see the reason to go with anything more complicated though you may find something more minimal that suits your needs.

https://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuwiki

https://www.dokuwiki.org/tips:cms

I don't know if there is a way to handle metadata for non-jpg images but there are a number of ways you could organize gifs including photo namespaces.

https://www.dokuwiki.org/media_manager

or using the imagebox plugin and just directly put tags in the caption

https://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:imagebox

or a number of other ways probably.

The nice thing about this solution is all the data is accessible and in plain text readable markdown which also makes it easy to strap other things onto, search through with whatever tools you want and easily run a backup process on (especially since everything is neatly contained within a folder).

Don't make the mistake most people of thinking dokuwiki is only useful as a traditional wiki, it is such a simple and general tool that its power extends far past that.
So I just saw this on hacker news https://Hostingyourgif.live Might be of interest
- Oops, looks like that's the wrong URL. I found it on Hacker News, here's the post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42431065 https://hostyourgif.live/
  
  Lol yeah, that's it. Damn autocorrect
I dont think there's anything that seamless integrate on keyboards or social/chat apps but you could try to selfhost a booru app and then share the hotlinks to those gifs.

They are mostly known for anime and weeb stuff but for memes and gifs I think the tagging system would work the best so you can quickly search what you want.
This might not be exactly what you're looking for, but there is a self-hostable image booru available on the flatpak repository called Hydrus. It’s essentially just a front end for a database you can run locally on your computer and organize images/videos by category. Add tags etc.
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.
Buy a VPS, set up Nextcloud and try it that way.
I would say an image archiver like Hydrus might be suitable for an individual, but I don't think it would have anything for your multiuser use-case.

I am curious if any popular keyboards accept custom gify/etc replacement URLs. It'd be pretty slick to set up Heliboard or Futo keyboard with an integrated self-hosted gify
- I would love to see what futo would come uo with in this department
- There's Ewe Sticker Keyboard that I use with gif files on Android. Particularly with sticker packs I ripped from Telegram.
  
  Thanks! I'll have to check it out myself.
  
  It doesn't help if folks are iOS, but perhaps ludicolo@lemmy.ml could set up a file sync server (e.g. nextcloud, etc) that syncs the files to their phones, and then an app like this could be used to pick images?
  
  Or maybe there's a way to set it up to read from a WebDAV mount point either in application or through Android?
(I made a seperate post because for alternate idea)

Have you considered hosting a lemmy instance yourself and possibly preconstructing lemmy threads in some bulk fashion with gifs grouped by topic or theme and just use lemmy itself as the platform to share gifs?

Just because lemmy threads were created to mimic reddit threads doesn't mean we are confined to only using lemmy as a reddit-like tool...

Just an interesting thought I had shrugs

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