Just this past week, all photo attachments sent recently to my Gmail account have disappeared. The little "paper clip" attachment icon is still present and lists the attachment content when I hover the cursor but I can not find the pictures themselves. They are not in the usual location at the bottom of the email.

Today, I received an email with attached photos but they only show as small thumbnails on the right side of the screen and I can not open them any further.

Gmail used to be so simple and straightforward; now they seem to be turning it into a complex and unwieldy monster with all the inbuilt social networking add-ons. I'm sure I somehow inadvertently activated some feature that is causing this but I can not find a solution.

I don't know what would cause that, I use an email program with my gmail accounts. An email program like thunderbird or what ever MS is offering and you only see the email functions on your PC. I recommend imap mode. I manage a number of email accounts from one program and never have to see any of that social stuff. The only attachment issues I ever had was caused by ToT never allowing an attachment over 25k to upload when I had IpStar, but I will never use them again anyway so that problem is finally solved.

Normally you can right click and select an option to view the photo in a browser or a program viewer or simply "save as" and select the location.

Post info about what program, browser and os you use with gmail and someone that uses them also may have seen this before.

Have you installed a program like Noscript in the last couple of days ? As it could be that something is blocking scripts which Gmail needs to run.

In addition to the post of RKASA, here is a page how to setup Gmail with an external Email Program.

http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=13287

And here a link for an Email Program (Free) if you don't have one.

http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/

Thanks for the suggestions. I just use gmail direct as web mail with Chrome browser. I am wondering if it might be an issue with "AD BLOCK"