Google on Thursday announced a change to how Gmail handles images: on the desktop, the email service will show images in your messages automatically starting immediately. The change will be rolling out to Gmail for Android and iOS “in early 2014.” Currently, Gmail asks you before showing images in emails. Google, like other companies that provide email services, does this to protect the user from senders who might try to use images to compromise the security of your computer or mobile device. The company has recently made changes so that Gmail will serve all images through Google’s own secure proxy servers. Images are normally served directly from their original external host servers, but this tweak means Google can be responsible for the security of images received in emails on its service.