How to Disable Contact Photos in Mail on Mac
Apple has been busy mucking with the design and functionality of the Mail app, this time bringing Mail Sender Icons to the Mac Mail app. With this new introduction to clutter the Mail interface, you’ll see a Contact Photo or mail sender icon next to the mail sender name, subject, and preview of the mail content. Whether or not you enjoy the Contact Photos in Mail app may depend on who and what you get emails from most often, and while some users may enjoy the mail sender icons others may not like them at all. If you’re in the latter camp, you will be thrilled to discover that you can disable the Contact Photos from appearing as mail sender icons in Mail app for Mac.
The introduction of the Contact Photos to the Mail app first appeared on the iPhone Mail app, but came to the Mac along with another significant design change, the Mail Categories sorting feature that tends to prioritize useless emails and hide important ones.
This is obviously focused on the Mac Mail app, but you can also disable Mail sender Contact Photo icons on the iPhone and iPad Mail app too.
How to Disable Mail Sender Contact Photos on Mail for Mac
This feature was introduced in Mail app with MacOS Sequoia 15.4 or later, earlier versions of MacOS will not have this feature to toggle off or on.
- Open the Mail app and go to the primary mail inbox screen
- Pull down the “View” menu and uncheck “Show Contact Photos”
- Contact Photos will immediately disappear as the mail sender icons
- You can change it back to show Contact Photos again by selecting that option
However you toggle the option in the View menu, the result for showing or hiding the contact photos will be immediate in the Mail app.
If you aren’t sure what this article is referring to, this screenshot shows them circled in red:
While you’re making this change, you might also be interested in disabling the Mail Categories inbox sorting feature on Mail for Mac, and perhaps you’ll pickup your iPhone to disable the Mail Contact Photos on the iPhone Mail app too.
I am disappointed at Apple’s tacit assumption that we will all want their ‘clever’ new features, such as Mail contact photos and categories, and Phone call recording, so that we have to actively disable them if we don’t want them. We should be able to ‘opt-in’, not have to ‘opt-out’.