@Jazzy

Yes, this is also what I experienced, however, luckily I kept my original Photo library (iCloud/Apple Photo’s) as it was, until I tested a few years of uploaded photo’s.

As advise for next time: Do not empty your original database until you are satisfied with the new one. ;) Been there, done that :D

Then I discovered the same problem. For me, this is a dealbreaker and probably will not continu to use Proton, at least not for Drive/Photo’s.

For other people who suffer with large data migration, these were my steps for migration (as iOS backup function in the Proton Drive app is not capable of handling a very large photo library).

1. Make sure your Apple Photo library file is on an external SSD (or your macbook SSD if sufficient space).
2. Make sure settings are on ‘download originals to this computer’.
3. Once that is done, create ‘smart albums’ in Apple Photo’s, you can chose your range, I did it per year.
4. Create a folder structure on your SSD or NAS (if available), depending on the available space.
5. In Apple Photos, chose ‘export originals’. Chose the destination folder.
6. Wait till the originals are downloaded/exported, do some random tests to see if it really downloaded the photos and videos.
7. Repeat this for every year.
8. You now have a platform independent backup of your photos and videos.
9. Start uploading from a folder to a platform you like to test.
10. Test the new platform how it behaves with your photos and videos.

I did this and found out that Proton Drive is simple not mature enough to properly sort and display thumbnails of photos in regular folders. I will not copy/paste those same photos to their photo gallery within Proton Drive, as this will cost extra storage.

See also other ideas I raised on this forum.

This is exactly my nightmare scenario!
I migrated my entire photo library to Proton Drive to free up space on my iPhone. I carefully organized thousands of photos into albums with specific naming conventions (e.g., 2023-Ireland, 2024-Berlin) on my device.
What happened:
Upon upload, all album structures were lost. The photos arrived as a flat, unordered list.
Trusting that the organization was preserved, I deleted the originals from my iPhone to save space.
Now, I have a massive, chaotic pile of photos in Proton Drive with no way to sort them alphabetically, chronologically, or by my custom order.
The Consequence: I have effectively lost a year of organized memories. Without a sorting function, finding specific albums is nearly impossible. This isn't just an inconvenience—it's a data management disaster for anyone migrating from Apple Photos or Google Photos.
Please prioritize adding alphabetical, chronological, and manual sorting options immediately. Until then, users are afraid to delete their local copies, defeating the purpose of cloud storage.

I am extremely organized. Your Drive has alphabetical order organization but your Photos section does not. I'm importing 1000s of photo albums and they all use naming hierarchy (year-month-name) so that they line up in chronological order. You don't have an ascending, descending, or alphabetical sort and this is going to be a nightmare to find the album I want.

I'm finding the functionalities to organize and filter / sort pictures extremely limiting and frustrating.

I want to have my photos from (e.g) a vacation shown in thesame order as I experienced the vacation. But I can't sort my photos any other way than descending from newest picture.

This is a basic feature in any type of service. I am a new user and I find it extremely strange that something like this is not available. I am migrating and I have more than 150GB of photos and I have everything organized. I had some problems with Google TakeOut since I did it manually so as not to link my account to Google, so I reorganized and uploaded things as I had them ready, and it turns out that when I look at it, everything is disordered as I uploaded it, instead of being able to use something like alphabetical order for my folders.

Having more than a few albums it can be hard to find the one you're looking for.

Albums are unusable like this.After google take out it'sa total mess.

I’d like to have the ability to reorder the albums, for example:
• in alphabetical order (and reverse alphabetical order)
• by the most recently modified (the last album to which a photo was added)
• by the album containing the most recent photo
• by a custom order (maybe)
• by some other condition...

Allow to sort Albums e.g. by name, creation date, ...
bonus points: Sort by tags

The current 'sorting' is not even done based on Album title, I really wonder how it's implemented. I prefix my albums by year - something I did in Google Photos - to be able to at least roughly sort them chronologically, but Proton Drive Albums really makes a mess out of it. Combined with the abysmally slow web interface it's rather unusable as it is now.

Also in the Web version of Proton Drive, being able to reorder Photo Albums is a great feature to have. Maybe implement drag-and-drop folders to reorder them.