Easier Image Downscaling
EDIT Feb 26: I MADE A TYPO! jpeg_extent should be jpeg:extent!!! Sorry! I found this at some point and didn't change it back up.
So on Cohost and other websites, you may not be allowed to upload images past a certain size (be that resolution or filesize), and require you to send a smaller image rather than the website downscaling for you. For most people, doing this either involves an "enough to be annoying" amount of work, or trusting your upload to some random website that says it'll downscale it for you.
The tool a lot of websites use to do this on their servers1 is called ImageMagick, and it's a tool we can use too. Normally that involves command line fuckery, but with the power of Windows Batch Files, we can turn it into an icon that you drag your images onto and receive a downscaled image. We also can control exactly what kind of downscaling we're doing, to meet file size or resolution targets.
The Short Version
Download ImageMagick for Windows
https://imagemagick.org/script/download.php
There's a bajillion links here but you only need the first one under the Windows section, as highlighted here. Install it normally, just make sure not to uncheck the box that says something about the path in the installer. It's checked by default so if you mash your way through, you'll be fine.
Open up a text editor (Notepad is fine) and paste in the following:
@echo off
%~d1
CD "%~p1"
FOR %%A in (%*) DO magick %%A -strip -define jpeg:extent=5000kb "small_%%~nA.jpg"
Save it as something with the .bat extension, such as smallify.bat. Then if you drag an image onto the batch file, you will receive a small version of it right next to, wherever you dragged the image from. It will be the same resolution, but now less than 5MB. It will also have metadata stripped from it, as you probably don't want that still attached.
You may need to press a button (any button) after the black window pops up, I don't know why this happens. But once the black box window closes, it's all done. This should be very fast unless you're converting a LOT of BIG files. And yes, you can drag multiple images onto this at once, so long as they're coming from the same folder.
If all you want is to make your images fit on cohost, that's it. If you want to know how to tweak this to other needs, or know how all of this works, there's more info below the break, including more examples if you don't care about how any of this works.
Also open for tagging suggestions for tags relevant to this kind of post
Image uploading is kinda broken right now due to site bugs (likely stemming from the new user influx, maybe?) but it kinda sometimes helps if you just crunch your image down real small? Even though the errors that pop out on the back end don't indicate that filesize should matter?
Anyway you can use the things above to make your image very small filesize if you want to try a temp workaround.
I also had luck dragging a local file for upload instead of copying the image from an open tab, which presents the data very differently.
