Ok, on the PHP version, I was running 5.4 and so I switched it to 7.0 just to try, to no avail. So I increased the memory limit again, and even at 4096M, it's not working. Other Ideas?
Side note: if you read my original post, this problem started with me trying to upload an .rar file to the "archive" section, so i don't see how this relates to the images issue you spoke of. Any other Ideas?