Email photo as attachment, not embedded, in iOS 14

leyda16 wrote:

The iPhone email app is a nightmare. I think it is embarrassing that other developers have a better email app than Apple's. I use either the Edison Mail app or the Outlook email app. Both add your pictures onto email as attachments, not embedded in the email body. I hope this helps someone.

Actually, leyda16, if any email client has any problems with any standards compliant message, which is the problem? The standards compliant message, or the client with the problem?

As for the standards compliance of the email messages sent by Apple’s Mail App, you need not take my word for it: simply perform the definitive test found in my comment at https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251807601?answerId=254806789022#254806789022.

I would love to see your results!

AntonioMarcos wrote:

Sorry again! I didn't install Gmail on this iPhone, …!

Then. Of course the suggested “fix” didn’t work!

I'm referring to Apple Mail, native to iOS and MacOS. In it, the photos become embedded in the text and not as attachments.

As I have explained, here, many times, there is no such thing as “embedded” photos not being “attachments”: such are only attachments with an (optional, and ignorable) formatting “suggestion”.

You need not believe me.

You can perform the definitive test, that I have shared the link to, multiple times, and check the standards documents I linked to (within the comment giving the definitive test).

It’s not Apple’s fault that there is a very tiny subset of email clients (consisting of a single email client and its derivatives, from a certain [non-Apple] company, that haven’t seen substantive updates/upgrades in over a decade), that have trouble allowing their users to perform bulk email operations (such as bulk-saves) when they receive such standards compliant emails.

Additionally, I can’t blame Apple for not wanting to “chases” fragile “compatibility” with a (wanton) non-standards compliant software, from such a standards violating company.

Of course, you can always provide Apple your Feedback, on such matters.

It sounds like you haven’t read any of the thread you posted to. But you can get a summary of it by reading the post by Halliday right above yours. The simple answer is that ALL PHOTOS IN EMAIL ARE ATTACHMENTS. There is no such thing as an “embedded” photo. But some email programs, Outlook specifically, choose to only display photo attachments in the body of the message. Most other email programs have an option to just download the images in addition to displaying them in the body. But Microsoft has decided not to support this capability.

Including a very short, i.e. one-sec is sufficient, video clip with the photo will send both as attachments. Apple- please restore the original functionality.

The work around i found: text phone to myself, then save photo to iPhone photos, then Air Drop photo to my iMac, then drag and drop .jpeg

Didn't work with blank signature boxes. But putting in a signature, sending an attachment, then deleting the signature and sending again seems to work. How odd!!

I try sending them through imessage (regular text message) and it send as attachment. not the best solution but closes to what it was before! same frustration here as many others!

A workaround is to take a very short video then include that in the email. It makes all the photos become attachments rather then embedding them.

I switched to spark email client...works great. This is not a plug for spark, just a sigh of a relief from someone who is tired of apple mails lack response to this issue.

Tried that. It makes no difference. You have to send as plain text to make it an attachment

Super simple work around... text your pictures to your email. You'll lose quality, but it is easy if you don't care about quality.

I have the same issue. I've discovered that when I was able to attach pictures to e-mail prior to IOS 14, the e-mails were being sent as plain text. Since IOS 14, every e-mail program I've tried (Mail and Outlook) will only send e-mails in HTML format and always embed photos in the body. Is there a way to force Mail to send a plain text e-mail? Before you could do it if you didn't have any special formatting in the e-mail.

Seems a good fix. However, I just set g-mail as my default mail sender - this avoids turning the other e-mail addresses off.:- Settings/ Mail/Default account etc. Setting icloud as default works just as well. Seems what messes it up is using a Microsoft Exchange Server e-mail account??

Note, Raasay1:

It’s not, per se, an Apple issue: Apple Mail still deals with these file attachments—and they have always been attachments, regardless how they may be rendered (displayed) by any given email client (software)—with full functionality of multi-attachment downloading.

The issue seems to have been narrowed down to an interaction between the Apple Mail composed email, being sent through a Microsoft Exchange server, to be viewed through a Microsoft Outlook client.

It is then at the Outlook client level that people seem to have their complaints.

Yes. There was a change at the Apple Mail client end.

Whether that change was simply changing the default email authoring format from plain-text to rich-text (which uses HTML, by the way), or Apple adopting a newer email standard, I do not know, yet. (Most people are not providing enough information to disentangle these two possibilities.)

Unfortunately, Microsoft is notorious for not keeping up with Internet standards…

In any case, the issue appears to be found strictly on Outlook clients.

Correct?

So, even though there are workarounds by changing intermediaries (such as sending the email out through a GMail server), the culprit is simply the Outlook email client: it appears to not give y’all the ability to save attached images en masse, at least under some conditions.

Isn’t that right?

This looks like an issue to be taken up with Microsoft, not with Apple, since Apple Mail doesn’t have this failing.

If anyone has any good contrary evidence, I would be greatly interested!

Well, as I wrote, fhfoote, there are two (2) possible changes that Apple may have made that may have exposed an issue in Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Outlook:

1. A change from plain-text to rich-text (HTML) default format for authoring emails.
2. A change in the email protocols (Internet standards) used by Apple (since such standards do evolve over time).

In either case, if Microsoft Outlook would properly allow users to download attachments—because that’s what they are and always have been, regardless of how any given email client may render (display) such—whether the email is plain-text or rich-text (HTML), this wouldn’t be an issue.

The fact that merely changing what server is used to send the email from Apple Mail to the Microsoft Exchange server, then to the Microsoft Outlook client, changes the end result at the Outlook client, suggest the problem is not in Apple Mail using rich-text, since any and all email servers will preserve rich-text emails (since the ‘90s, at least).

This suggest that, regardless whether Apple changed the default authoring format, there is an email protocol change that is only causing trouble when a direct Apple Mail to Microsoft Exchange transfer occurs.

Unless anyone has counter evidence for this assessment, of course.