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How can we improve Proton Drive?

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Create dedicated photo app

I know that the current plan is to fully integrate the photos feature into the Proton Drive app.
However, I think it would be more logical to have a dedicated app for photos and one for documents in general. With combined apps, I fear that the app either gets overloaded or features will be missing because it would get too crowded otherwise. The photos app also needs wayy better performance than the current app (at least on android, the photos feature is very slow and misses a lot of crucial features, like face detection, editing or a map to show where photos were taken).

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Tobias Görgens shared this idea  ·   ·  Report…  ·  Admin →
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  • Mikołaj commented  ·   ·  Report

    Yea. What we need is a billionth app. 🙄 Please don't separate them.

  • elena Dowson commented  ·   ·  Report

    I agree that a dedicated photo app could make a lot of sense, especially if it can focus on performance and useful photo features without making the main Drive app too crowded. Face detection, editing tools, and better photo organization would definitely make managing photos easier. For anyone looking to do more creative edits, tools like PicsArt can also be useful for things like enhancing photos, adjusting lighting, and making other edits: https://picsartmodl.com/

  • Lucas commented  ·   ·  Report

    There is an opensource app developed by an independent developer for Android that does a lot of the features requested and which is way better than Proton Drive app to manage photos. It was really the thing missing for me in the proton ecosystem, I'm so happy to found this one.

    If you want to try it out: https://www.photosforproton.eu/

  • grizzly commented  ·   ·  Report

    need this. it makes me miss gogole photos and I hate google. Gonna have to look for alternatives if the photo feature in drive isn’t improved or moved to a dedicsted photo app.

  • Adyta Ady commented  ·   ·  Report

    have around 700GB of photos and videos in Proton Drive Photos, and honestly the browsing speed is the main thing holding me back from fully committing to it as my daily gallery. Scrolling through older albums often takes a few seconds to load each thumbnail, and there's no meaningful local caching happening, so basically every photo gets decrypted fresh from the server each time you open it.
    I actually looked into switching to Ente Photos for the 1TB plan, purely for speed and convenience, but at $9.99/month that's a real cost just to fix something Proton should be able to solve, especially since I'm already paying for Proton Duo with 2TB storage. I'd much rather see that money go toward a proper standalone Photos app that's actually optimized for fast scrolling and smart local caching, the way Ente or Google Photos handle it, rather than paying for a second service just to get decent speed.
    +1 for a dedicated app. The current implementation feels like a file manager with a gallery view bolted on, not a proper photos app.

  • Jack West commented  ·   ·  Report

    Ente Photos is crushing it as an E2EE photo app. Wish it was Proton's.

    Immich is good as a non-E2EE photo app. Wish it had E2EE as an option.

    Backup is great, but when you have almost 20 years and 3TB of photos/videos, you need search, organization, and sharing.

  • Benny Keys commented  ·   ·  Report

    This is a must. Especially the feature of being able to share pictures and albums with friends and family who do not have a proton account.

  • [Deleted User] commented  ·   ·  Report

    I have personally been using a self-hosted Immich instance for a while now (https://immich.app/). Immich is open-source and contains pretty much all the nice features that Google Photos has. I like it very much.
    Maybe Proton can take this open-source Immich project as a starting point to build their own photos app (with correct encryption and such).

  • Perry commented  ·   ·  Report

    especially on android where you can choose which photo app is your default. This would be incredible if i can just bypass my phone photo app entirely.

  • QualitativeWords commented  ·   ·  Report

    I would also like a dedicated photos app. The single biggest pain point in my transition from Google to Proton is that I can't access my Proton Drive photos through any of my other apps. Want to attach a photo to a text message from Proton? Android can't access it. Want to use Proton as the default image app? Drive isn't recognized as a viable option. Photos are the number one thing I use in private storage. I think this is true for many other basic users who are just trying to escape the all-seeing Google eye. By making an app dedicated to photos, these issues can be resolved. I would also like the option to determine whether my photos are encrypted by default. (I have to imagine the decryption is why the photos take so long to load and the majority of my photos I'm fine with being unencrypted). Like others, I would prefer if the actual storage location was the Drive, but the photos themselves were accessible, viewable, and modifiable in a dedicated photos app.

  • Joseph commented  ·   ·  Report

    ... maybe with a feature on the side in the photos app that lets us swipe through photos... right: keep, left: delete so that we'd clean temporary photos right away and avoid cluttering the Drive storage

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