Images and Imgur

This website has been built using NextJS, React, Markdown, and some other odds and ends. Because I'm using Contentlayer, and it doesn't play well with NextJS's image management, I decided to upload images to an image hosting site. imgur seemed like a reasonable choice, so I went with that.

To try to make my life a little less awful, I started looking at MacOS programs to help. There were a few. They either seemed unmaintained, sketchy, or too complicated. I looked at uPic which seems to be somewhat popular. I looked at a list of tools on imgur's website, but there were a few that didn't seem to be out there anymore. I had just about given up when I ran across this Reddit post.

Well, well, well... someone was able to just do it using Shortcuts, which is built into MacOS (and iOS). I downloaded the Shortcut, and just removed the final step (which started up ObsidianMD), which I don't use.

The biggest win is the shortcut can be triggered from the sharing panel in MacOS. It takes the image, converts it to jpeg if necessary, shrinks it below 10MB, uploads it to Imgur, and returns the image URL in markdown format in the clipboard. Awesome!

That's exactly what I needed, and the squirrel at the top of the article was my first use of the shortcut. Awesome!