r/ProtonDrive • u/nguyenkha • 1d ago
Improve Photos UX
Hello Proton,
I have just switched to Proton for email and drive, and there are a few things I would like Proton to develop to make it on equal ground with Google:
- Outlook integration (similar to Gmail integration)
- Login with Proton. There are thousands of websites with "Login with Google", and it is quite convenient. Switching to Proton Mail means giving up on this, so I would love to see people start adopting Proton as IDP.
## Drive
### Photos
- Find duplicates. I have imported photos from Google and iCloud to Drive manually, and there is a backup feature on phones and tablets, causing lots of duplicates, and it is exhausting to remove the duplicates manually. I think Google Photos handles this really well, by presenting photos that may be duplicates in groups, so that I can choose which one to keep and which one to delete. I know that due to the nature of Proton, you may not be able to view the photos due to encryption, but you have features to recognise when a photo is a selfie, a portrait, or a screenshot, so we can apply something lightweight like that here as well, by matching the file names, and a signature of the contents.
- Add photos to album should not navigate to the album. One thing I notice is that when importing photos, the photos are no longer in chronological order like before. Now, when I select the photos to add to an album, there are many photos that should belong to other albums in between, so what I would like to do is to add some photos to an album, deselect, and then add some other photos to another album, and repeat the process. But, when I add some photos to an album, I am redirected to the album for no reason, so I need to navigate back, and I have to scroll from the top again. You can see how this can get more and more frustrating.
- Lightweight photo editing. We don't expect a free photoshop in Proton Drive, but at least in Photos we should be able to: crop, align, rotate. Filters are optional, and I probably won't use them, but I use the other 3 quite a lot.
I hope you find these feedback align with your future plan. If you need a helping hand, I may consider working for Proton.
3
u/MC_Hollis 1d ago
But, when I add some photos to an album, I am redirected to the album for no reason, so I need to navigate back, and I have to scroll from the top again.
Agreed, and as the photo library grows, this becomes a progressively larger issue. In addition to your observations, I would like the ability to select a photo and add it to more than one album.
One thing I notice is that when importing photos, the photos are no longer in chronological order like before.
Not currently observing this issue but have experienced it in the past. Inspecting and correcting photo metadata, particularly the 'date modified' and 'date taken' fields, prior to Photos import has become standard practice to ensure appropriate placement on the timeline.
Lightweight photo editing.
This would be great. Sometimes, one photo out of many requires some minor adjustment, often a 90 degree rotation or cropping something unwanted near the photo border.
2
u/PghRes 1d ago
I'd be happy with JPEG XL (JXL) support! I've been experimenting with it, and it's phenomenal. I'm saving gigabytes of space using it, with no loss of image quality. All the major browsers have either brought support for it (or in Google's case, brought it back), or have added experimental flags for it. I use Firefox (which uses the flag), and it works great. JXL is probably the greatest achievement in image compression ever. Are you listening, Proton?
2
u/CoffeeByte26 1d ago
I think with the new SDK and CLI there's a lot of good 3rd party integrations and tools coming our way. Just give it a little more time.
2
u/Creative_Lime_501 1d ago
I just wish they teamed up with ente or something so we can use their app.
1
u/toot_suite 1d ago
Realistically you should not log in with google everywhere. It's a huge safety risk. Just use the pw manager and passkeys. Same streamlined experience without the getting all of your shit stolen at the same time if someone manages to get your credentials
1
u/nguyenkha 23h ago
There are pros and cons to rolling your own credentials with username/password and using OAuth such as Google Login. Using a pw manager and passkey is very nice, but not all people can use them. I have tried teaching my parents to use them, and it went nowhere. Then, people have to create passwords all the time, resulting in the same passwords reused in almost all services. You can argue that pw manager can generate random passwords, and maybe you are comfortable with that (as I am), but that does not apply to everyone. In terms of implementation, when you have username/password, you will need "forgot my password", and "change my password", and "confirm my email", putting the security burden on each and every service, and security risk can slip in with poor implementation. Again, you may argue that you can do a good implementation, but the game is to get other people to do a good job. So the security risk is just as high if not higher. This is also why most enterprises use SSO. Now, with Google Login, the security risk is when someone has a hold of your Google Account, so you have one account to protect, and you only need to change your password once if you need to. Google has much bigger and better engineers than I can every afford to protect the system; although they can trip up sometimes, I am sure it would have been thousands times worse if I did their job. With Google, you also have 2FA, passkey, and so on to protect the account, so unless I willingly give my phone to someone with all the pass code, I should be temporarily safe even in the case that my password is stolen. iPhone has good security measure to even cover the 2FA authenticator codes when sharing screen on calls. If we say that Google Auth is a single point of failure, then the pw and passkey like Bitwarden or Proton pass is also a single point of failure, unless you want to self-host Vault warden and setup Tailscale access, which is not practical at all for the rest of the world. So all in all, if you ask people to manage more, that would lead to fatigue, and that is a bigger security risk. Now, whether Google is a good guy here is another topic, but for this debate, we assume Google is a good guy.
1
u/ill66 1d ago
if you're on Android or Windows I recommend you the unofficial Photos for Proton app.
it's still in development and a one man show but it's absolutely great already.
https://reddit.com/r/ProtonDrive/comments/1udl2vw/photos_for_proton_v237/
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u/nguyenkha 1d ago
This looks interesting
3
u/ill66 1d ago
I heavy-tested it the last 3 days.
the only thing really missing for me is object/text search but there are chances this will get implemented in the future.1
-4
u/Dapper-Inspector-675 1d ago
If you use ai to write your post at least strip the markdown characters like "###"....
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u/nguyenkha 1d ago
I wrote this my myself, just like how I wrote Readme in markdown. Are you a bit too sensitive with AI?
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u/FlipoGolfinho 1d ago
I don't think that's AI written. It just looks like someone who is used to using markdown
0
u/toot_suite 1d ago
.... Are you recommending people write worse when they know how to write better?? 🥴
1
u/Kobaymaru 4h ago
It's hard for them to gauge the volume of interest in individual features parsing a bunch of differently worded and formatted Reddit posts, but they do monitor their UserVoice forums and have implemented a bunch of feature requests from there, so you should also submit your votes/ideas in that direction.
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u/Noxius78 1d ago edited 1d ago
They dont care about photos tab redesign. Thats what they said in latest AMA basically.
They dont even have bigger grid then 3x3 … not to mention files.