How to Make Outlook for Mac Show Pictures by Default

For reasons I cannot fully understand, I decided to use Outlook on my Mac. That’s when I discovered that Outlook was making me click “Download Pictures” on every single email, which is really annoying. Here’s how to make Outlook download the stupid pictures automatically.

The whole reason Outlook doesn’t download pictures by default is for privacy reasons—somebody can theoretically find your IP address by embedding a hyperlinked image in an email that you open. You’d think that at least Outlook would show pictures from people in your contacts list by default, but it doesn’t even do that. It’s just off, across the board.

Make Outlook for Mac Download Pictures in Emails Automatically

To change the setting, open up Preferences from the menu bar, and then find the Reading entry. On the Reading page, flip the Security setting for “Automatically download pictures from the internet” to either “in messages from my contacts”—which is probably a reasonable setting—or “in all messages” if you just don’t want to ever click the Download Pictures button again.

When you’ve changed the setting, you can automatically see pictures, like these delicious potato recipes from our friends at CenterCutCook. If you like food, their newsletter is worth a signup.

Now if I could just figure out how to show my iCloud calendar in Outlook.