So you’ve just come across an amazing GIF. Ridiculous! How could someone make such a weird face? But now you’re left with one big question: where’d it come from? Usually, you’d have to do a reverse image search, or leave a comment and ask, but now Giphy has a much more elegant solution: just click the GIF and have it switch over to the source video. Then, you can watch exactly where it came from.
This new feature is launching in a very limited capacity. For one, it’ll only work on GIFs that have been made through Giphy’s GIF maker (or manually given an attribution link) and embedded using Giphy’s native GIF player. On top of that, it’ll only work with Vimeo videos at launch. That said, all existing Giphy embeds that meet these requirements will automatically be updated with the ability to switch over to the source video, so you may start seeing this around right away.
Here’s an example:
Theoretically, Giphy will add support for YouTube and other common video players over time (it seems like a hard get, but you can even imagine this working with Netflix). But for some odd reason, nothing else is supported just yet. That makes this feature a lot less useful at launch, especially since it seems safe to guess that a very large portion of Giphy’s GIFs originated with YouTube videos.
“This is the first step, you should expect to see other platform compatibility rolling out quickly,” Jason Stein, Giphy’s director of business development, says in an emailed statement. “Ultimately, we want this technology to work across the internet.”
Giphy says that money isn’t changing hands as a result of its partnership with Vimeo on this feature. Stein says collaborations like this “are very symbiotic relationships where we explore organic ways to work together.”
Update June 1st, 1:10PM ET: This story has been updated with additional comment from Giphy.