Agree with everybody else here. A stand alone app is the only way forwards. An easier solution would be to acquire Ente - there app is superb!

There SHOULD be a separate Proton Photos app!

Trying to combine Proton Drive with photos is TERRIBLE!

The performance is EXTREMELY painfully slow and unbearable!

Furthermore, ProtonDrive does NOT copy albums from the phone, unlike Google Photos.

Ente has AMAZING speed, and everything loads up just fine, but I much prefer to stay with one ecosystem and trust a company in Switzerland rather than an American one.

I would love a photos app linked to my camera app. But the metadata should be left alone or optionally removable.

I am a photo organiser and the metadata is very useful information for organisational, searching, dates & location use. There are other apps that can remove the metadata before posting online.

Really good suggestions here. I'd select these features first:

"Add photos to the proton drive desktop apps" = CRITICAL
"Low-res cache" = IMPORTANT

I'm not a biggest fan of AI features, since more datacenter capacity would be needed, and it would make Proton Drive more expensive.

Proton photos is lacking a lot compared to iCloud/Google photos, and even Privacy-first alternatives like Ente. A ppor photos experience is a deal breaker for many. Heres my full list of suggestions:

- Standalone Dedicated App → The current "Drive" interface is too slow and clunky for media; a native gallery experience is required for smooth browsing and organisation and other features im about to suggest.
- On-Device AI Person Recognition → Proton should group photos by faces without sending biometric data to the cloud like how Ente does.
- On-Device AI Object & Scene Search → Enables natural language search ("Beach," "Dog," "Cake") locally, solving the lack of discoverability in large libraries like how Ente does.
- Photo Map → List all photos in a map if the user has photo location in metadata similar to how Apple Photos does.
- Low-res cache → Store compressed thumbnails for the entire library on device so users can scroll instantly and search without internet, fixing the "slow loading" issue.
- Automatic Duplicate Removal → Duplicate photo removal tool
- Add photos to the proton drive desktop apps → For example on mac, proton drive can sync drive folders. it should also be able to sync photos to desktop helping with better export and import
- Takeout Tool → Includes better importing and exporting (exporting especially). Its really upsetting theres no easy way to export proton photos library easily.

Proton needs to create a standalone Photos app that is actually useful in a way that Ente Photos is. It is the primary reason why it doesn’t make sense for many people to switch to Proton unlimited. Need features like automatically sorting location, people, and albums. Would be great!

I'm on the fence about this one. A photo app would be nice, but a REAL photo app would have editing features and stuff like that, and so we stray from the point of Proton in the first place. The more we ask Proton to do, the more expensive or will become, and really we are here for the privacy and security, not the an app for everything.

Agreed, I would also like to see more google photos features brought over (use lumo if necessary) but finding similar photos based on face or location tagging would be a nice upgrade.

Have you seen Ente? Fully private, open source, cross platform and just for photos. Constant evolution. I was using Flickr reguarly, but Ente has become so good now I use it a lot more often!

We need a proper dedicated photos app. I have a subscription to Ente, since using Proton Drive for photos is a pain. Is slow, thumbnails can be corrupted, very difficult to organize photos and videos. The idea should be to migrate all mi family into Proton Drive/Photos, but it is impossible at the moment.

As many people said, there are other projects as Docs or Sheets, that being honest should not be on the top of priorities on the development of Proton Drive.

Even maybe it will be better to partner with Ente, since they are doing great in order to have a proper private Photos cloud storage, basically same mindset as Proton regards privacy.

Realmente creo que esto es en lo que más falla protón, tener las fotos en Drive es un estrés constante tardas 7 años en encontrar cualquier cosa y es odioso. Sin embargo en Google Photos en 2 segundos encuentras todo. Deberían hacer una app parecida o inspirada, con opciones como Google Photos que te muestra previews antes de baja resolución mientras carga la imagen completa (en segundos), o eliminar las imágenes ya subidas en la nube del dispositivo para liberar espacio. En fin creo que de verdad protón necesita una app dedicada completamente a la galería tipo Google Photos o Apple Photos. También he visto un comentario hablando de Immich, no se mucho de esa app pero parece que sería una buena colaboración o compra lvd ns pero deberían solucionar el problema de galería ya

agree, u can also take inspiration from Ente.
Kind regards!

Proton and Immich really should cooperate. The code is already done. "Just" integrate Immich with Proton Drive / Photos and we're happy.

I can imagine the E2EE part might be a problem for this, but it shouldn't be impossible.. right?

I agree the drive app is too basic for photos. I currently use immich for photos on a local server but would love to see some more options from proton.

I’ve looked into moving our entire family’s digital ecosystem from Google to Proton.

However, as long as there isn’t a dedicated Proton Photos app where photos and videos can be organised into albums and automatically shared across family devices, it’s not going to happen.

For me, Docs and Sheets are irrelevant, but a proper photo app is critical — and without that, I won’t get the family (read: my wife) on board.

Improving proton drive's photos with basic metadata stripping like leaving the date untouched for ease of use would be a better than making a new app

Just making the drive photos better would do the trick easier then making a new seperate service

Build on top of Drive a different app Protpn Photos. Basic functionality like Ente would be great. Proton Drive photos cannot handle bigger photo accounts at the moment.

This would offer a big step if you'd like to de-google your apps

I removed all my photos from Google to Proton Drive Photo. I've got more than 20 000 photos. As stated in a lot of comments, at this stage I find it uneasy to use to manage my photos: create, manage, sharing albums is a pain.
And it is very slow. On my laptop in Firefox it takes minutes for the thumbnails to be displayed. I've tweaked every options but that doesn't help much. On Android it's not better.
The poor performance is really a big issue for me. And it lacks basic features as stated by the community.