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Those of you who have logged-into your Gmail account on or after 12th December probably have seen automatically load images in emails option upon signing into your account. On December 12th, Gmail team announced that Gmail will now automatically display images in emails, meaning users don't need to click Display images below or always display images option to view images in emails.
According to a post on the official Gmail blog, for all these years Gmail wasn't automatically loading images in emails for security reasons.
Earlier, Gmail used to serve images directly from their external host servers but now Gmail serves all images through Gmail's own image proxy server, meaning that senders can't use image loading to read cookies in your web browser and get information like your location and IP address.
Even though automatically loading images in emails sounds like a good idea and should make most users happy, users who're on a slow connection or metered connection might want to turn off this feature.
While Gmail asks your permission before enabling this feature (if you haven't singed-in to your Gmail over the last week, you'll see the prompt next time when you sign in), if you have already said yes by clicking automatically load images option, and now want to stop Gmail from automatically loading images, you need to follow the given below instructions.
Step 1: Sign into your Gmail account.
Step 2: Click the gear icon located at the top right of the page and then click Settings to open Gmail Settings.
Step 3: Scroll down to the Images section in the General tab.
Step 4: Enable the option titled Ask before displaying external images. That's it! From here on, Gmail will not automatically load images in emails and ask your permission before displaying images in email. You need to click Display images below option that appears just above your messages to view images in your emails. That's it!
How to set your own photo as Gmail's background image guide might also interest you.
