This seems to be a recurring, if minor, headache. When we last discussed it in January, it turned out there were some business/hosting constraints making it difficult for the SDMB to support image & video pasting the “proper”, easy way: Can we consider allowing direct image uploads?
Nonetheless, this has been bugging me for the last few months.
I finally decided to try and do something about it, and made a Chrome/Firefox extension that will allow you to paste/upload media right into the textbox here, as Discourse intended:
Behind the scenes, though, it won’t try to upload that directly to the SDMB (which won’t work, as we saw here). Instead, it will upload it to an external host* and then just paste the URL here (that fightingignorance.org link). That lets Discourse manage the in-line preview functionality, as normal, without actually having to store the uploaded file on SDMB servers.
Would this be helpful to anyone else? If so, wanna help me beta test it? 
I have a basic version working now, but it needs more polish & testing.
*The “external host” is just a cloud file hosting service (Cloudflare R2, a competitor to Amazon Web Services). I decided to put the images there because:
- We don’t want to use any SDMB resources or incur any expenses for its current owners. R2 is cheap enough that it probably won’t cost much, if anything.
- Doing it this way means it’s fundamentally the same thing as uploading a photo to an external site like Imgur/Photobucket/Shutterfly/Google Photos/etc. and then pasting the URL here.
- Except this way, it’ll be easier to use and not require any logins or signups. It won’t have expiring URLs, annoying ads, etc. You’d just paste (or drag and drop, or click the upload button) right here as you’re editing the post, and the plug-in handles the rest for you.
Let me know if any of ya wanna try it out.