How about first, Proton builds global search in Drive on mobile (not just for photos)? Lacking search is such a massive miss for cloud storage. I have no idea how it isn’t the #1 request on this board.

Being able to search by file type / file extension would be amazing.

And the inability to search by File Name is a little infuriating. Let's get this added!

Making EXIF "Image Description" field visible would be helpful too.

I would like to be able to see which photos are not part of an album.

And please, please, please make it possible to sort the albums (by name) too.

Add face recognition :)

I love the privacy-first approach of Proton Drive and recently moved my photo backups here — but one of the biggest limitations I’ve hit is the lack of photo metadata functionality compared to apps like Google Photos or native iOS/Android photo managers.

Currently, the Proton Drive mobile app only allows basic scrolling by date (via the month/year bar), but there’s no way to view or use metadata like:
• Capture date vs. modified date
• Camera model/device info
• Location data (when available)
• EXIF-based sorting or filtering
• Search by month, year, or keyword

This makes browsing large libraries quite clunky, especially if you’re trying to find a specific photo from, say, “May 2022 in Spain” or all photos taken with “Pixel 6”.

What I’d love to see:
• A photo library view with metadata-based filtering/sorting/search
• The ability to view photo metadata details
• Search improvements that use date, device, or location tags

Adding these features would really help Proton Drive compete with other photo solutions while staying true to Proton’s privacy values.

On Android it looks like they've got a somewhat low-res (by year-month) scroll bar on the right side of the screen that shows up once you scroll. That being said, I think it's going based on date uploaded or whatever the default sort order is-and since I have the same issue with thousands of photos, that doesn't help too much.

Imo the devs might find some inspiration for interface (esp sorting and grouping options) in the fossify gallery app-though of course since fossify is local it probably has different metadata access than Proton.

TLDR my $0.02: if any single thing could be changed, it'd be the ability to sort by date taken (or date created if date taken unavailable).

This might be a separate feature request, but having the ability to search by objects or text in the photos is super helpful. I’ve been thinking about running my own local model on my folder of photos in proton drive just to generate metadata and then having a local web app to do document and photo searching.

Android Photon Drive: Allow viewing photos as a list, or smaller thumbnails. Allow quick skipping screens of photos to get to the desired photos faster. In case of 10s of GB of photos it is practically impossible to quickly go to the oldest photos just by scrolling. Scrollbar, if it exists, is invisible in case of a large number of photos.
Also, I shouldn't have to wait for all the photo previews to load to be able to scroll further in the past.
Or allow search by a year, month, at least. Similar grouping and quick scrolling through years of photos as in Google Photos would be best. The way it's implemented now in Proton Drive is unusable when dealing with a large number of photos. Thanks!

yeah this is vital to reach old photos.

I would love to see a date-based scrollbar in Proton Drive on all platforms, both mobile and desktop. This scrollbar could display days, months, and years, making it much easier to quickly locate photos by date.

Currently, there is no scrollbar, which means users have to endlessly swipe or scroll to find older images. Adding this simple feature would significantly improve the usability of Proton Drive, especially for photo management. While Proton Drive still has a lot of room for growth, this would be a strong step forward in enhancing the overall user experience.

The fact that this is my own suggestion HAS NOTHING TO DO with the fact I love it! It is great! So special!

I just imported my 20 year archive of photo's into proton Photos.
Currently there is no real way to navigate this collection except by spending the day scrolling.
I personally really like the google photos 'scroll by year' feature. It works for me.

At the moment it is super difficult to access old photos in proton drive. Sometimes you have to scroll down for several minutes. A timeline at the side where you can quickly scroll to a rough date (like in google photos) would help immensely.