cohost support

 I would like the ability to paste images from my clipboard into the cohost new post window, like we can on twitter, imgur etc. This would make composing posts faster, as I don't have to specifically save images to my PC before uploading.

This is my single biggest quality of life thing for chosting

I frequently just draw something off the cuff in MS Paint or Clip Studio and post it as a gag. Not having to save every single thing would improve my life immensely here on Cohost.

It also makes Cohost the host of exclusive content that I didn't save to post anywhere else.

I'm going to make some enemies here and say that I think this is an anti-feature.

Basically, the clipboard is a terrible place for image data to exist. I know it makes the process buttery smooth to do but unless cohost decides to implement some automatic image processing (I sure fucking HOPE not) then you're usually posting some really horribly unoptimized image. at BEST it's a PNG, and in other cases it's a Tiff, or sometimes even just a raw uncompressed bitmap.

There's an effect you've observed out in the wild before where over time a post on a site like twitter just gets more and more artifacty every time it's reposted. This is because people copy the image to their clipboard and paste the image to their twitter window, and then somebody copies the copy. Twitter turns the PNG into a JPG, and then the user turns it back into a PNG, back and forth, until this ugly MOLD grows on the post.

If Windows, MacOS, Android, etc would change the way clipboards worked, I would have zero objections to this, but as it stands, I really advise against Cohost implementing this feature that everybody wants, and that I myself would use. Saving the image to your desktop as the proper filetype and then posting it is the moral equivalent of returning your shopping cart return station.

This is one of the most important quality of posting features imo

 i don't mind images getting absolutely deepfried, i just think it adds to the hilarity of it.

@remeranAuthor All browsers have the ability to recompress images as PNG using the toDataURL method of a <canvas>, and I think some can support JPEG or at least WebP, so the bitmap/TIFF thing should be solvable without any server-side effort.

Please, please do this. Oh my god. Please.

 [quote=I think this was already discussed by staff it’s really tricky because of the upload limits because what if you copy png that’s three million years big and they’re like oh shit can’t use that, probably an unnecessary feature[/quote]

Twitter will refuse a paste if the file size exceeds their limit, so it's definitely possible.

(p.s. I've done client-side image uploads from clipboard before Professionally™ and it's nowhere near as bad as some people are making out; there are ways and means for keeping it lossless but reasonable)

Something to note about re-encoding images on the client side:

firefox recently added a (nonstandard) way to choose the png compression level when using toBlob (or toDataURL) on a canvas: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1724331

canvas.toBlob((blob)=>{
   /* callback function */
}, "image/png", "-moz-parse-options:png-zlib-level=9")

 This can result in much smaller file sizes (at the cost of slightly longer encoding time)

(on other browsers, this parameter will just be ignored)

In addition:
when copy/pasting an image from a website, the browser will convert it to a png, but:

it's also possible to access the image url (request the clipboard data as html, and it will give you an <img src=...> tag), so for publicly available images, the server could download that file directly from its original source, to avoid re-encoding it (this is especially good if the original was a jpeg etc.)

pulling up to say i miss this feature terribly when i use cohost!

+1 to this request

the artifacting of repeatedly saved and posted images is also considered by some folks, though not myself, to be a feature

but its def something i'd like for purposes of liveblogging things, which is one of my primary joys in the world

This would be perfect to have! I never knew how much I missed having the ability to do this! I have to drag the screenshots I take into the post window since it won't let me paste it. it'd be great to just have that convenience again!