I don’t want to get photos as attachments

KiltedTim wrote:

Whether you see them inline or as attachments will depend on how the sender attached them and formatted the message.

+1 ... it's how the sender embedded the image in the first place ... and even then, some mail systems do not sustain embedded images and attach them instead. You cannot change this on the receiving end. At least, in all my years working with many different email systems I have never seen a way for the recipient to specify embedded vs. attached.

I don't believe the Mail app has that feature so you can recommend it to Apple in www.apple.com/feedback. By the way, you can preview mail attachments without opening them by simply hovering or single clicking the attachment with the mouse and tapping the spacebar.

You can use the same for any files in Finder, for example if you have a document and you want to see what it says, single click it and tap the spacebar.

Whether you see them inline or as attachments will depend on how the sender attached them and formatted the message.

It depends on the email app the sender is using. And whether or not the email provider supports embedded images. Tell the sender to try dragging the image into the body of the email instead of attaching it. You will both have to experiment.