Either way, a tap on ‘Images’ and you’ll see the two choices: You can see that I’ve set it to “Ask before displaying external images” already but yours will probably have the default. The setting you seek is about half-way down: “ Images“. Yes, this means you can have more than one email address configured! To adjust the settings and preferences for a specific Gmail account, you want to tap on the Gmail account name on the top list. Now you’ll see your basic settings, but don’t be disappointed, there are LOTS more options one further tap away: See the Settings option just above the last entry? That’s what you want. To enable the setting, start by going to the folder (errr, “label”) menu and swiping down to the very bottom of the list: Gmail‘s reaction? Finally, in Gmail for iPhone you can turn off automatic image loading, but it’s been rather a wait for that to show up. And so people seek to prevent the automatic loading of graphics in email, particularly from unknown senders. Truthfully, this is benign for all but a tiny fraction of marketing companies, but from a privacy perspective, do you really want someone else knowing when you read their email messages? Probably not. You might not have realized, but a lot of marketing companies include invisible “tracking” images in the email they send you so that they can ascertain when you open and view the message: If images are automatically loaded, you reading that message causes the image to load and gives the company data in that regard.
Used to be that people would want to avoid loading images in their email because of bandwidth concerns but in these more modern digital marketing times, odds are it’s more about tracking.