How to download all the photos from a Gmail email
Gmail will download every attachment at once. Photos pasted into the email itself, it won't.
I built InboxBinder for a solo lawyer whose clients send their documents by email, and a lot of those documents arrive as photos: a driver’s license, a signed form, a page of a lease, each one snapped on a phone and pasted straight into the body of the message. Getting them out of Gmail is harder than it should be, because the “Download all attachments” icon at the bottom of the email doesn’t include them.
The short answer
For photos attached at the bottom of an email, Gmail’s “Download all attachments” icon saves them all at once as a zip file. For photos pasted into the body of the email, Gmail has no button that downloads them all at once (its own help forum confirms it), so you save them one at a time. If what you need is every photo in one file for a client record, InboxBinder can collect them all in two clicks.
Gmail’s built-in option: one photo at a time
Hover over a photo in the body of an email and three buttons appear in its corner: “Download”, “Add to Drive”, and “Save to Photos”. They work well for a single photo. For six photos, you hover and download six times, and each one downloads as a separate file.
On my test email, which has three photos in the body and three attachments, “Download all attachments” saved the three attachments and none of the three body photos.
People ask about this regularly, and the answer from Gmail’s own help forum is blunt. In two threads asking how to download all the images pasted into an email, one from January 2024 and one from April 2025, a Gmail Diamond Product Expert replied “nope” to the first and “no there isnt” to the second.1 The person in the 2025 thread described the problem well: on a desktop, with higher-resolution photos, it meant “scrolling around … trying to find the tiny download arrow at the bottom left corner of each.”
The workarounds people use
The answers that rank for this question offer a few ways around it:
- Your browser’s “Save Page As”. The top-voted answer on a Stack Exchange thread about this (viewed about 94,000 times) suggests saving the whole email page, which writes the page’s images into a folder on your computer.2
- Dragging each photo to your desktop. Another answer on the same thread suggests this; a commenter replies that to get the full-resolution version, “you still have to click on the Download button that pops up when you hover over the image.”
- A Google Workspace add-on called Save Emails, which saves the photos from an email to Google Drive.3
Each one either still works photo by photo, saves the whole page rather than just the photos, or moves the photos into another Google product.
Every photo in two clicks: InboxBinder
InboxBinder is a Chrome extension that collects the documents from the email you have open and saves them as one PDF, entirely inside your browser.
- Open the email in Gmail and click the InboxBinder extension icon.
- Check the list. Every photo in the body of the email is a row with a thumbnail, and every attached PDF, JPG, and PNG is a row too. Very small images, like icons, start deselected; deselect anything else you don’t want, like a logo from someone’s signature.
- Click “Save as one PDF”. You get one PDF, named with the date, the sender, and the email’s subject.
Each photo goes into the PDF at its original resolution. If a photo is sideways, the Rotate button on its row turns it upright with one click before saving. No files leave your computer in this process.
The tradeoff, stated plainly
You get one PDF of the photos, not separate image files. For a case folder or a client record, that’s usually the point: one document with every page in it. If you want the photos themselves, to put in your phone’s gallery or in Google Photos, Gmail’s per-photo “Save to Photos” button is the better tool.
What InboxBinder doesn’t do
It handles JPGs and PNGs for photos, plus PDFs. iPhone HEIC photos aren’t included (yet), and the popup lists anything it leaves out by name.
In a thread, it saves what’s in the newest message, including images and attachments that were forwarded along with it. Attachments sent with earlier replies aren’t included.
It runs in Chrome on a computer, not in Gmail’s phone apps.
The first 5 saves are free with no account. After that it’s 2 free saves a month, or unlimited for $49 a year.
Which one to use
For one or two photos, hover and click Gmail’s own “Download”. For photos you want in your phone’s gallery, use “Save to Photos”. For a client’s email with a handful of photos pasted into it that need to end up in one file for the record, that’s exactly what InboxBinder was built for.
If clients send you photos by email as part of your work, I’d love to hear what you do with them today. I read every email at [email protected].
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Gmail Help community threads “How do I download multiple images at once in my emails?” (January 2024) and “Downloading multiple large image files from the same email” (April 2025), checked October 14, 2026. ↩︎
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Web Applications Stack Exchange, “Download embedded-images attachments from Gmail,” checked October 14, 2026. ↩︎
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Digital Inspiration, Save Emails documentation on downloading inline images, checked October 14, 2026. ↩︎