Using Maildrop for a collection of photographs (jpeg) - doesn't work as it used to.

Using Sonoma on Apple Silicon we are having trouble using Mail to send a folder or album of photographs using MailDrop.

In Photos selecting all the photos in the album and then using the share button to email them results in an email within just the tiny preview versions of the pictures. In Finder doing the equivalent thing gave the same result.

In Finder selecting the folder itself and emailing that using the share button did use MailDrop to send something of the right size BUT the recipient (Apple Mail App on Sonoma) could not identify the file type and saving the attachment to a folder gave the same shrug from Finder. It turned out the workaround was to add the extension .zip to that attachment; after that Finder happily decompressed it and all was OK. That workaround is much too much for most of the people we might send photographs to so it really is not good enough.

What seems to be the same setup on an Intel Mac did not have this problem.

Anyone here know a secret setting that might need fixing?