If it helps anyone out there, I had the same problem where I had too many photos to export from the browser easily (~12,000 photos/videos)

I made this tool for myself to automate it:

github.com/tom-barone/proton-drive-photos-export

What is the point of automatic photo backups if when you need to recover your photos, it takes so much work to do?

You can, but it is inconvenient. And once you do, your browser crashes since the photos part of Drive is scaling so bad.

The more I read the suggestions here, the more I despair at having signed up for a paid subscription.

I have 44k photos I want to get off iCloud, sorting, delete and download. Click > scroll > shift is not a viable way to select tens of thousands of files.

I would really like this on the iOS app. There's a "deselect all" option, but no "select all" one.

This is a basic feature, but least the trick from J.C. works (click photos, not months).
But download through desktop (Mac!) app should be possible - can be just another folder to show, no?

1. Click checkbox on the first photo to select it.
2. Scroll ALL the way to the bottom.
3. Hold SHIFT while clicking the checkbox on the last photo.

This selects all photos, in the same manner as you would use the shift key in File Explorer.