> But to make that decision, I need to see the images. I could run a bash script to generate those images in a bunch of different qualities and then view them with some kind of image viewer, but that's extra steps - and it involves creating a bunch of temporary files that I then need to clean up.
That's not correct at all. You can, in fact, do all of these steps in a single command line program with Konsole (or iTerm2 on Mac, or Kitty - whatever terminal you're using, as long as it supports these features), imagemagick, and bash.
$ for size in $(seq 10 10 100); do; convert -resize $size% input.png output_$size.webp; timg output_$size.webp; done
timg, here, is https://github.com/hzeller/timg, but you could use anything that speaks iTerm2 or kitty. This approach generalizes easily, too; you can easily use this to vary any parameter imagemagick supports, like webp compression or posterization or dithering, and print out any parameters of the image, like size, along with the image itself.
> With the web version I can snap a screenshot with CleanShot X and then drag that screenshot straight onto the web page. I instantly see the different images, pick one that looks good to me, download that and then drag it into my S3 uploading software (Transmit).
In my workflow, I edit in Showfoto or Darktable, resize (or, in my case, more often dither and resize) as demonstrated, and then `cp` the appropriate selected image into my blog's main image folder. Hardly more difficult, and while you might not enjoy it, that's exactly my point - we can both make things we like, but you're asserting that LLMs massively changed the landscape overall, while I'm not using them at all.
I also have a script, which took about one minute to write, that cleans up the extra temporary images, so that's not much of a concern either.