iPhone can only save one attached image at a time

iPhone 12 pro. Recently my phone has started doing this: I open an email with multiple images (jpegs 800 px) attached, then i click on one image, hit the arrow at lower right, scroll down to click on Save 12 (for instance) images, but it only saves the one image. I have to save each and every image separately. Quite time consuming. This behavior is relatively recent, well I guess it's been nearly a year. Anybody know what's going on?