Gmail – save videos, photos and documents in the Gmail Account

The purchase options for Google storage include bonus Gmail storage in the cost. You can go here to have a look, in essence both plans will boost your Gmail space to 25GB (plus you get the extra space on Google Drive of course).

Other things to try:

• You could check for huge emails or attachments taking up space (some methods in this answer)
• Make sure your Spam and Trash folders are empty
• Download your emails using an email client like Thunderbird as describe in this Google article

Google also have a page on this topic with a number of suggestions - some included here and others more complex such as delegating the account to another.

At this point the general consensus is that there is no way to turn off this "embed images" function of the otherwise "drag-to-attach" feature of the new Gmail.

There are a few criteria to keep in mind though, circumstances in which attachment will occur rather than embedding:

• Dragging in multiple images simultaneously (using multi-select, shift-click, ctrl-click, window, etc) will attach the images rather than embed them.
• Dragging in non-standard or proprietary image formats, such as PSD, will attach them rather than embed them.

Otherwise, if you want to attach a single image of a common format, such as JPG, you'll need to click the paperclip button at this time.

Hopefully, the Gmail team will recognize the issue and allow for some sort of option or setting or other mechanism for simply attaching single images in the future.