Recently, when I was trying to download a gif file from Giphy, I noticed that when I went directly to the file, https://media.giphy.com/media/14kdiJUblbWBXy/giphy.gif for example, that it was actually loading a web page instead of the gif file.

Now, on this page, you could choose to alternative/right click on the image and then click “Save Image”. But, this will download the image with a .webp extension. From there, you can choose to change the extension to .gif if you’d like. But, I’ll be honest and tell you that I didn’t consider switching the extension at first. So, I dug further.

I figured that Giphy was probably detecting that based on who/where the request was coming from, so I tried downloading the gif file by running a cURL command. This worked, but it’s not convenient to have to open up a terminal window to run a cURL command.

Luckily, a kind person left a very helpful comment below with an even simpler approach, which I think is the simplest approach overall.

Simple approach

When we go to a standard Giphy source URL, like https://media.giphy.com/media/14kdiJUblbWBXy/giphy.gif, a web page is loaded instead of the gif that we want. Now, the only thing we have to change for the actual gif to load is to change media.giphy.com to i.giphy.com.

So, if we take the above example, we could load the actual gif by going to https://i.giphy.com/media/14kdiJUblbWBXy/giphy.gif

From here, we can alternate/right click to download the gif with the correct extension and go on about our day.

Downloading via cURL

curl https://media.giphy.com/media/KXgJsSeOfvSgg/giphy.gif --output ~/Desktop/download.gif

This resulted in the actual gif file that I wanted being placed on my Desktop as download.gif.

Published by Eric Binnion

Father to a Hero, Code Wrangler at Automattic, WordPress core contributor, and alum of Midwestern State University.

47 thoughts on “How to download a gif from Giphy”

  1. Thanks for this. I dont know why Giphy just doesn’t allow you to get a GIF file as need, instead they force another format. The command worked as expected.

    Reply

  4. OK, noob question, but is running a cURL command different than pasting into a browser? Instead of a download, I’m directed to search results on that address. (Tried three browsers and several default search engines) . Thanks!

    Reply

    1. Hi Joe – Yes, running a cURL command is different than pasting into the browser. On a Mac, you’ll need to run this from the Terminal app, or some other similar program. If you’re on a PC, there should be an equivalent there as well, though I haven’t had a PC in a while.

      Reply

    1. Hello Tosin,

      Open up the “Terminal” app, copy and paste the command above (being sure to replace the URL with that of the GIF that you want) into the “Terminal” app, then hit enter. Afterwards, the GIF should be available on your Desktop.

      Reply

  7. I right clicked on the Gif from Giphy > Save to (Google) Keep> Then from Keep, Right clicked gif then > Save. It default saves as .gif. I have a label created for GIFS in Keep. You can also do this for your Google Drive but may have to go through keep first. Of course you have to have the Google Keep Extension and chrome app. If you don’t have Keep, you should. BTW- Did this from PC Windows…. More than one way to skin a fish.

    Reply

  12. % Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
    Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
    0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 –:–:– –:–:– –:–:– 0Warning: Failed to create the file ~/Desktop/download.gif: No such file or
    Warning: directory
    0 1201k 0 5484 0 0 5484 0 0:03:44 –:–:– 0:03:44 167k
    curl: (23) Failed writing body (0 != 5484)

    i got this only

    Reply

  17. I’m having the same issue- the file is downloading as a web page when I right click on it. I tried your command and it downloaded a file that is a .gif, but when I open it, it opens in preview and just shows all the photos as layers. I tried in in photoshop as well and it did the same thing. Thanks for your help,

    Reply

  18. What a great piece of expert advice.
    Key to the whole thing for Mac Users is this:
    Open up the “Terminal” app, copy and paste the command above (being sure to replace the URL with that of the GIF that you want) into the “Terminal” app, then hit enter. Afterwards, the GIF should be available on your Desktop.
    I had never come across Terminal before (in fact nore anything else in the utilities folder).
    Thank you for the knowhow.

    Reply

  27. Thanks a lot!! Choose the option for replacing “media” with “I”. Still works like a charm
    i.giphy.com/media/m2Q7FEc0bEr4I/giphy.gif

    Reply

  30. In the save as window, use quotation marks to force the extension – “filename.gif” – this should tell the OS to ignore the .webp part. Works in Windows 10.

    Reply

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