Proton Drive lacks critical, simple ways to interact with media uploaded with Proton Drive. Photos not on device (e.g. uploaded from phone, not on PC) are invisible to File Explorers, file selectors, OS search, file uploaders and even Proton Drive and other Proton apps themselves! This makes the idea of media files in the Cloud somewhat redundant for anyone with all but the simplest of needs, and results with some kind of fresh **** as an editing workflow. The current model that splits a Photo UI from a File Explorer UI has some utility, but not at the expense of access, organisation, modification and control - which Proton Photos sorely lacks. The model appears to be heavily inspired by Google Photos, which feels like a miss; and I can't think of single reason to make Cloud media files inaccessible to the file owner. Microsoft, for all of their flaws, get this right (mostly).

For the record, I am not against a Photos UI. But I expect, as a minimum, my media to be treated as files - because they are. I would be happy to volunteer some development time to see this happen. Thank you.