Make all Apple Mail attachments an icon with terminal

For a long time now, we’ve been frustrated with Apple Mail’s decision to show one-page attachments in their entirety (inline) when we’re composing emails.  By default, Apple mail will only produce a thumbnail for the attachment if it’s more than one page.  That gets very messy if we’re sending several one-page attachments.

One of our consultants, Pat O’Rourke, found a terminal command that will change the default behavior to produce an icon for every attachment.  We’ve paid our respects to the terminal gods and are posting the quick tip here.  To use the command, follow the instructions below.

Open Terminal.  You can find it in Applications/Utilities/ or just do a spotlight search for it.  Paste this command in the terminal window:

defaults write com.apple.mail DisableInlineAttachmentViewing -bool yes

Press enter.

That’s it.  All one-page attachments should now show as an icon.  If you’d like to return it to the default configuration, just paste this next line into a terminal window:

defaults write com.apple.mail DisableInlineAttachmentViewing -bool no

Press enter.

Please let us know if you have any questions about this process.  We’re more than happy to help.  If terminal isn’t your thing, then just let us know and we’ll help tame the command line for you.