Context compaction summarizes older messages and keeps the most recent ones verbatim, splitting the chat at a user message. It skipped the chat whenever the first follow-up message sat too close to the end to keep the share set in the Retained Messages admin setting. So a fresh chat with one question and one reply carrying a lot of tool output never compacted: the follow-up failed with a context length error, and regenerating or editing that follow-up failed the same way. Now compaction splits at the first follow-up message in that case, keeping fewer messages than Retained Messages asks for, so the chat keeps working. Chats where a split already met that share compact as before, and compaction between tool calls is unchanged.
Fixes#32781
Images stored inside the chat record itself (chats from older versions, images that could not be saved as files, temporary chats) had their encoded data counted as text when estimating how full the context is, so a single 3 MB image counted as about a million tokens. That pushed the chat over the compaction threshold, summarizing older messages while the chat was well under the limit, and made the context usage indicator jump. The encoded image data is now left out of the token estimate, both for compaction and for the indicator.
Fixes#31913
