How do I save Gmail attachments on iPhone?

Last reviewed: September 25, 2026 · Markdown version

Open the email in the Gmail app and tap the attachment. For a photo, Google's steps give you Download, Drive, Photos and Share at the bottom of the screen; for a PDF or other file, they document Save to Drive. All the Gmail steps here come from Google's iPhone help page (Open & download attachments in Gmail (iPhone & iPad), read 25 September 2026).

Photos

Open the Gmail app, open the email, and tap the attachment.
At the bottom, choose: Download (to the phone), Drive, Photos (Google Photos), or Share.

A picture shown inside the message rather than attached works differently: touch and hold it, then tap Save to Photos. If nothing saves, Gmail probably lacks permission — Google's fix is Settings → Privacy & Security → Photos → Gmail, and choose Full or Limited access (same page).

PDFs and other files

Here Google's page (the Open & download attachments page) documents one action: tap the attachment, then "In the top right, tap Save to Drive", and you'll see "Saved to Drive". The page does not mention Apple's Files app, and it does not say which of the photo actions, if any, appear for a PDF. So if you want the file in Files rather than Drive, look for a share or export button on the open attachment; that route is not on Google's page, so we cannot promise what you will see.

If your Gmail is in Apple's Mail app instead

Apple documents the Files route directly: in a message, "touch and hold the attachment", then choose Save Image for the Photos app or Save to Files for the Files app (Download email attachments in Mail on iPhone, read 25 September 2026). The same guide adds a way to find them: turn on filtering and choose "Only Mail with Attachments", or add an Attachments mailbox to the Mailboxes list.

Where the copy goes, and what it weighs

Saved to Drive: by our reading it then counts toward your Google storage twice, once as the attachment and once as the Drive file, because Google counts both "Gmail messages and attachments" and "Files in Google Drive" against the shared 15 GB (How your Google storage works, read 25 September 2026).
Saved to the phone or Files: it uses iPhone storage instead, and the email in Gmail is unchanged.

Saving is copying. If the reason you are saving attachments is a full account, the step that changes the number comes afterwards: removing the emails that carried them. How to find the heavy ones.

When Gmail warns you about an attachment

Google flags some attachments as suspicious, for example when "Some attachments, like documents that require a password to open, are encrypted and can't be scanned for viruses" (the Open & download attachments page). Its advice for a message that looks wrong is not to reply and not to download; if it is from someone you know and trust, you can ignore the warning.