I use chat in a pretty thin window, so I only see the icons of the side bar. For some reason on my desktop drag&drop is more like drag&hope so it'd be nice to have an indicator that it actually worked and the file is uploading.
A little circle or bar would be sexiest but even just a quick blink to indicate it's working would already be beneficial imo
If you have pointers on how I could impl something like it I could try my hand at making it have fancy UI myself but up2u I don't have much to do in fr*nce (ok i can work fine but yk)

ok but then it sometimes adds a file:// link in the input box as well LOL
i love linux it works so awesome

I had a related idea some time ago. Adding text while an image is uploading is annoying because the bbcode tag will randomly pop in, so I thought of adding a text placeholder that you can type around, and that the uploader will fill in later. Preferably a single obscure Unicode character so it's harder to accidentally use or destroy. This might be extendable to show a progress bar, but then some jank would be required to make the indicators robust enough despite being animated. Maybe filled blocks followed by variation selectors? Or just custom PUA symbols?

i suppose it could be worth looking at how other services do it, i think the issue editor on GitHub (and maybe also Forgejo?) has a similar system