Yeah, but is there a similarly easy way to extract Base64 from image, without plugins?
That's a different plug, with its own post.
Podes plugs came before Ashley snuck that in, and well before we had the browser object that would allow you to do that in js.
A less arcane method would be to paste the image into the Paster plug and then get its image.url as a string, which coincidentally is base64.
You would need to time the grabs correctly as well.