GIFs are moving to Discourse core!

We’re bringing the GIF picker that’s currently available as a theme component directly into Discourse core. GIFs in Discourse are now served via Klipy. ^[1]

Bringing GIFs to Discourse core means easier setup, particularly for our hosted customers who can use the enable_gifs setting to activate GIFs in their community without further credentials. As part of core, GIFs will also now get first-class testing, updates, and support going forward. The end experience is unchanged from what you see today — GIF button in the composer toolbar and in chat, which opens a GIF search modal:

If you are already using the GIFs theme component…

Hosted customers will be automatically migrated to the new core feature over the coming weeks.

Self-hosted customers can run the following rake task to migrate your existing settings across to Klipy: rake themes:discourse_gifs:migrate. Please consult Klipy’s API documentation to get a key.

What about existing GIFs on older posts?

Existing GIFs are unaffected. GIFs already posted in older topics will continue to display as normal as they are sourced from the provider CDN. The change only affects new GIFs being added to posts.

:gear: Turning on Enable GIFs in your community

For now, this is considered an experimental change! We’re welcoming your feedback, which will help us make improvements and roll this out further.

If you are not using the theme component already, then you can turn this on by heading to the Upcoming changes page in your admin area (/admin/config/upcoming-changes) and find the Enable GIFs item. Update the Enabled for… field to opt your site in to this new design:

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1. We previously offered GIF support through Giphy and Tenor — but Giphy’s pricing is now exorbitant and Tenor is shutting down. ↩︎