Only just now got a notification of your reply, but it shows as posted 5 days ago - weird.
Why do you think the housing market is “hot?” I haven’t seen anyone saying that the housing market is currently hot - rather the opposite, with buyers not buying due to interest rates and sellers not wanting to lower prices below where they were in 2022. Prices have finally dropped from where they were last year, but that’s not indicative of a hot market.
Zillow thinks that San Francisco is expected to have the second lowest growing home values in 2025 (second only to New Orleans), and Sacramento and San Jose are both in the top 10 as well, so I don’t think CA is performing any better than the best of the country. And in the rest of the country, according to realtor.com, last month was the slowest November since 2019; the number of houses for sale has grown for 13 straight months and is now the highest it’s been since December 2019.
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.