Small embedding characterizations for large cardinals

We show that many large cardinal notions can be characterized in terms of the existence of certain elementary embeddings between transitive set-sized structures, that map their critical point to the large cardinal in question. As an application, we use such embeddings to provide new proofs of results of Christoph Weiß on the consistency strength of certain generalized tree properties. These new proofs eliminate problems contained in the original proofs provided by Weiß.