Gallery & timeline
Your whole library, in one timeline. The photos on your device and the photos in your Proton Drive come together in a single view, sorted by the day each was taken. A photo that lives in both places is matched by its content and shown once, so a backed-up photo appears a single time, never as a duplicate. A dock underneath switches between Gallery, Albums, and Shared.
Pinch to change the grid, drag to jump dates
Pinch the grid to move through seven densities and their groupings in one gesture. The densest views show eight, six, or five columns grouped by year; four columns group by month; and three, two, or one column group by day (three per day is the default). An optional edge-to-edge layout drops the rounded corners and side padding so photos reach the screen edges, while headings and covers stay neatly inset.
A scrubber sits on the right edge for long jumps through a large library. Grab the handle and a tooltip follows your thumb with the date of the photo at the top of the screen; an optional floating date label does the same as you scroll. In the normal grids it reads down to the day, and in the densest grids it reads to the month.
The status avatar
The profile avatar in the header doubles as a status indicator. At rest, a ring around it shows how full your Proton Drive storage is. When photos are moving it animates to show an upload, a download, or a backup in progress, and it can flag an available app update or a lost connection. Tapping the upload or download mark opens the Activity screen; tapping the avatar itself opens Settings.
Categories and type badges
Photos are sorted into categories that appear both as badges on the thumbnails and as quick filter rails: Favourites, Screenshots, Videos, Live and Motion photos, Selfies, Portraits, Bursts, Panoramas, and RAW. Proton Drive's own labels are used where they exist, and the app works out the rest on the device where it can. You can add or remove a category on any photo from its details, backed up or not, and mark a favourite the same way. Videos show a central play icon and a small length badge, and on the densest grids the corner badges step back so the small thumbnails stay clean.
Select many at once
Long-press a photo to start a selection, then drag from it to sweep a whole run in one motion, scrolling past the edge of the screen to keep going. The action bar shows only the actions that apply to what you selected. From a selection you can:
- Share, download, or delete the whole set at once.
- Back up, keep available offline, or add to an album in Proton Drive.
- Hide the selection to the vault, or remove its metadata.
Deleting or hiding can be undone: a bar offers a roughly five-second Undo on whichever screen you are on. Undoing a delete restores both copies, the cloud copy from Proton Drive's trash and the device copy from the system trash.
Filter the timeline
A filter sheet narrows the current grid three ways: by media type, by backup status (On device, Backed up, or Cloud only), and by date. The date picker takes a single day, or a range chosen by dragging across a calendar. The category rails can be reordered or hidden, and albums and device folders can be kept out of the main timeline, so it shows only what you want to see.
Viewer
Tapping a photo opens the full-screen viewer, a swipeable pager over the set you were browsing. Images pinch to zoom, videos play with pause and mute controls, and a slideshow can advance through photos and videos on its own, continuing through a screen rotation. The toolbar carries favourite, delete, download, edit, and share, and a details sheet gathers the place name, resolution, duration, size, the folder the file sits in, and every album it belongs to. Deleting a photo keeps you in the viewer on the next one instead of dropping you back to the grid, and when you do leave, the grid returns to the photo you stopped on. Photos taken in Ultra HDR display with their full brightness range on devices that support it.
A motion photo (a still with a short clip attached) shows a play control in the viewer and plays its clip inline over the still, then returns to the still when it ends. This works for motion photos on the device and for backed-up ones once the full photo has downloaded.
Memories
A Collection screen, reached from a pinned card on the Albums screen, resurfaces older photos in two ways. "On this day" gathers what you shot one, two, five, and ten years ago on today's date, grouped by year. "Seasons" groups your photos by season. Each shows a small preview, and tapping through opens the full grid. The same screen is also the way into a places browser and a world map of where your photos were taken.
Device folders
Every folder of photos on the device is browsable on its own, listed on the Albums screen. Open a folder to see just its photos, then upload a selection or the whole folder, mirror the folder as an album in Proton Drive, add photos to an album, or delete them.
Backup & sync
Backup copies your photos and videos to Proton Drive, encrypted end to end, so only you can read them. It is opt-in and runs in the background once you have chosen what to include. The same content-based matching used across the timeline also keeps backup efficient, so a photo is never uploaded twice and reinstalling the app does not re-upload a library that is already safe.
Choose what gets backed up
Set the backup scope in one of two ways: name the folders to include, or turn on "back up everything" and exclude the folders you would rather leave out. Continuous backup is on by default, so new photos and videos are backed up automatically as they appear. You can turn it off and still back up individual photos on demand, and a "Sync now" action starts a pass whenever you want one.
Wi-Fi and background data
A Wi-Fi-only option holds every automatic upload and refresh until you are on Wi-Fi, so backup uses no mobile data. Opening the app or pulling to refresh still checks Proton Drive on any connection, so a manual check is always available. Full-resolution downloads have their own Wi-Fi-only switch.
The same photo is never uploaded twice
Photos are matched by their actual image content, not by name or date, so a renamed or copied file is recognised as the same photo and uploaded only once. After a reinstall, the app lists what is already in Proton Drive and pairs each device photo against it, marking the ones already backed up and uploading only what is genuinely new. Uploads wait for that matching to settle first, which is what stops a reinstall from re-uploading a whole library.
Optional upload compression
To save space in Proton Drive you can compress photos and videos as they upload. It is off by default, with separate switches for photos and videos and a shared quality tier:
- Light. Gentle compression at full resolution.
- Balanced. More saving, with large photos and videos scaled down moderately.
- Space saver. The smallest files, scaled down the most.
Compressed photos keep their existing metadata (within whatever you have chosen to strip), and transparent or animated images are left as they are. Your on-device originals are untouched unless you choose to mirror the smaller copy back to the device, and if a file cannot be compressed it uploads unchanged.
Activity
An Activity screen, opened from the status card in the gallery header, shows everything moving in and out of the app across three tabs:
- Uploads. Each photo on its own row with a thumbnail, what is happening to it, and a progress bar, with a batch cancel.
- Downloads. The same, for photos being saved back to the device, cancellable per batch.
- History. Finished transfers, newest first, expandable to their thumbnails and clearable.
Albums & sharing
Albums gather your photos into named collections. You can create an album, rename it, choose its cover, and add or remove photos at any time. The album view uses the same grid and sweep-select as the main gallery, with a full-width cover image across the top. The Albums tab shows both cloud albums stored in Proton Drive and the photo folders on your device.
Creating and organising albums
Create a new album from the Albums tab, then add photos to it from the gallery or from inside the album itself. Every album action lives in one sheet: add photos, share, download the album or save it to your library, rename, start a slideshow, change the sort order, and, for an album shared with you, leave it. Any photo in an album can be set as its cover.
- Filter the tab. Show all albums, only cloud albums, or only device folders. You can pick which filter the tab opens with, and optionally have it reopen on whichever filter you last used.
- Sort the grid. Order albums by name, by most recent activity, by photo count, or in a custom arrangement of your own.
- Rearrange by hand. Press and hold an album to enter reorder mode, then drag albums into the order you want. The grid scrolls on its own as you drag near an edge, and dropping saves the arrangement.
- Choose the cover size. Show 2, 3, or 4 covers per row.
- Order photos inside an album. List an album's photos newest first or oldest first.
Cloud albums carry a small cloud badge and device folders carry a folder badge, so you can tell them apart at a glance. Long downloads and back-ups report their progress on the Activity screen, and a running job can be stopped from there or from the progress indicator that started it.
Mirror device folders to Drive albums
A folder on your device can be mirrored to a Drive album, so new photos in that folder join a matching album automatically as they are backed up. The album is named after the folder (Camera, Screenshots, and so on). Turn it on with the "Album" checkbox shown next to each folder's "Back up" checkbox in the backup settings, or during first-time setup.
Sharing
Share an album by inviting people by email, each as a viewer or an editor. You can manage members, switch someone between viewer and editor, and revoke access at any time. People you invite see the album in their Shared tab, where they can accept or decline it.
- Proton and non-Proton recipients. Invite anyone by email. If the address has no Proton account, an email invitation goes out prompting them to open the album with a new account, and it appears under "Who has access" as a pending external invite that you can revoke like any other.
- Editors can contribute. An editor can add photos to a shared album and remove photos from it. A photo added to someone else's album is copied onto the album owner's storage, so it stays in the album even if you later change or delete your own copy.
- Save a shared album. Save an album shared with you into your own library. Photos already in your library are skipped, so saving does not create duplicates.
- Ready straight away. The Shared tab shows your cached albums immediately, even with no connection, and refreshes in the background.
Photo editor
A full editor built into the app. It works on the photo in front of you and keeps your edit non-destructive until you save, so you can press and hold the preview at any time to compare against the untouched original.
Adjustments and colour
Thirteen adjustments cover the everyday work: Brightness, Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Saturation, Vibrance, Tone, Temperature, Sharpen, Grain, Vignette and Fade. Vibrance leans into the flatter areas and protects skin tones and already-vivid colour, Sharpen is an unsharp mask, Grain adds monochrome film noise, Vignette shades the edges, and Fade gives a soft matte look.
A dedicated colour tool goes further with tone curves (an RGB master plus separate red, green and blue channels) and HSL control over eight colour ranges, so you can push one colour without touching the rest.
Crop, rotate and perspective
Crop freely or lock it to a shape (the photo's own ratio, 1:1, 4:3, 3:4, 16:9 or 9:16). Rotate in ninety-degree steps, flip, and fine-tune with a straighten slider and vertical or horizontal perspective correction.
Draw, text and redact
Draw freehand with a colour and width of your choice, or type text straight onto the photo and drag, pinch and twist it into place. Redact covers part of a photo with a solid black or a pixelated brush at an adjustable size.
Hide faces
Face hiding finds every face in the photo and covers each one with an oval that follows the face, either pixelated or blurred, at a strength you choose. The detection runs entirely on your phone, and its model is downloaded once, only the first time you enable the tool.
Quality and saving
While you drag a slider the preview renders at screen size so it stays smooth, and the saved file is always rendered at full resolution from the original, so what you see while editing never limits the exported quality. Save a new copy (JPEG, PNG or WebP, with a quality and size of your choice) or overwrite a photo on your device in place, keeping its original format. An edited copy inherits the original's capture time and its EXIF, so it sorts next to the original in your timeline rather than jumping to the top. A backed-up or cloud photo is always saved as a new copy, because Proton Drive keeps a single version per photo.
Video editor
The built-in video editor covers the common edits without leaving the app. Trim the length, crop the frame, rotate, mute the sound, overlay a music track, combine several clips into one, grab a still frame, or turn a video into a GIF, then save the result to your device, to Proton Drive, or as a copy to another app. Where an edit allows it, the video is saved without re-encoding, so it stays fast and keeps its original quality.
- Trim. Shorten a clip to the part you want, using the fast path with no re-encoding.
- Crop. Reframe the picture to a new shape.
- Rotate. Turn the video to the correct orientation.
- Mute. One tap drops the audio track, kept fast and lossless.
- Music overlay. Add a music track over the video and trim the added audio to fit.
- Grab a frame. Save the frame at the current position as a photo in your gallery.
- Combine clips. Add more videos and join them into one, then export the result as a single file.
- Make a GIF. Turn a video, or a section of one, into an animated GIF saved to your gallery.
- Location removed on export. Every exported video has its location data stripped out.
Metadata
Photos for Proton reads and writes photo metadata on your device. You can correct what a photo says about itself, and decide exactly what travels with it when it is backed up or shared.
Search, map & places
Photos for Proton gives you several ways to find a photo again: a fast search, an interactive map and a spinning globe of everywhere you have been, a browsable list of places, and a calendar view of your library by date. All of them span photos on your device and photos in Proton Drive.
Search
Search by filename, media type, year, month, and person, and by whether a photo is on your device or in the cloud. Matching ignores accents, so "jose" finds "josé". Before you type, the search screen shows recent photos, an "on this day" row, a jump-to-month grid, and cards that open the map and the calendar.
- Search by description. With semantic search turned on, find a photo by describing what is in it. The matching runs on your device with a model downloaded once from a public repository, works without an account, and sends nothing to a server.
- Filter as you search. Narrow by media type, by whether a photo is on the device or in the cloud, and by a date range.
- Search by person. When face grouping is on, a row of named people appears; tap a face to show only that person's photos, combined with any other filter.
- Act on results. Select one result or many to share, add to an album, back up, download, save offline, hide, or delete, with delete undoable straight afterwards.
Map & globe
Photos that carry a location appear on a map as small rounded thumbnails. Tapping a place opens its page with a photo count and actions to share, add to an album, download, or save the place as an album. A city search lists your places by how many photos each holds. Place names are worked out entirely on the device against a bundled place database, with no network lookups.
The default view is a self-contained globe that highlights only the countries and cities where you have photos. Spin it with a drag, pinch to zoom, and tap a city to open its photos or a country to see its cities. The globe draws entirely on the device and needs no connection. You can switch between the globe and a classic street map at any time from the map's own switch button.
The classic map uses OpenStreetMap tiles, so it carries the "© OpenStreetMap contributors" credit. Loading those tiles is the map's only contact with a server outside Proton, and it only ever sends the area of the map you are viewing, never your photos or their locations. Locations are filled in from a photo's own details on the device, or from the encrypted copy held in Proton Drive for cloud photos.
Places & calendar
Every place opens the same full page whether you reach it from the map, the globe, or the Places browser in your collection, with share, add-to-album, download, and save-as-album actions. The city search lists your places ordered by photo count.
The calendar shows your library a month at a time, one month per page. Tap a day to open it with a hero image, the day's place, and a description you can edit. A type-to-jump box takes a month or a year and scrolls straight there. Day notes and covers are saved with or without a Proton account.
On-device intelligence
Photos for Proton can find the people in your library and read the text inside a photo, and all of that work happens on your phone. The machine-learning models are open source and downloaded once from a public GitHub repository, after which they run entirely on the device. Nothing about your photos is sent to a server to be analysed. These features are optional: a model is downloaded only when you first turn a feature on, and only after you agree to the download.
People (face recognition)
Face recognition groups the faces across your photos and videos into people you can browse and name, all on the device. It uses two open-source models that run on your phone: YOLOv5-face finds the faces in a photo, and GhostFaceNet turns each face into a compact numerical signature, so faces with matching signatures are gathered into the same person. Both models are downloaded once from a public GitHub repository and can be re-downloaded from Settings.
Name a person once and the name stays with them as your library grows. A dedicated review view lets you name, merge, or dismiss groups (handy for statues, posters, or the occasional false detection), and dismissing something clears it from anywhere else it turned up. Face recognition is off until you switch it on under the machine-learning settings. The photo editor's face-hiding tool uses the same on-device YOLOv5-face detector to locate the faces you choose to blur or pixelate.
Read text in a photo
Long-press a photo in the viewer and the app detects the text in it and highlights it, ready to select. The selection uses Android's own text tools, so the handles, the magnifier, and the Copy button are the ones you already know. It reads printed text, including accented Latin characters, straight from the picture.
The recognition runs on the device using the open-source PP-OCRv5 models, downloaded once from a public GitHub repository the first time you use the feature and then run entirely on your phone. There is no network step in the reading and no dependency on Google services.
Privacy & security
Photos for Proton is built so your photos stay yours. Your library is end-to-end encrypted in Proton Drive, you can use the app with no account at all, and the app carries no analytics or tracking of its own. This section covers how that works.
End-to-end encryption
Your photos are stored end-to-end encrypted in Proton Drive. Encryption happens on your device before anything is uploaded, and decryption happens on your device when you open a photo, so the content can be unlocked only with your account's keys. No readable copy of your photos sits on a server.
Use without an account
The sign-in screen offers "Continue without account", which opens the gallery straight to the photos already on your device, with no Proton session at all. Everything that needs only the device works: the timeline, device folders, search, the calendar, memories, the viewer, favourites, the metadata editor, hiding to the vault, the duplicate finder, and the on-device machine-learning features once their models are present. You can also organise your device photos into real folders while signed out.
You can sign in to Proton later at any time with no data loss. Your cloud photos appear, and every screen fills back in where it was, because the app re-connects the gallery to your account rather than starting over.
Hidden photos & vault
The hidden vault is protected by your fingerprint, face, or device PIN. Opening it prompts for that credential, it re-locks the moment the app leaves the foreground, and while it is open the app blocks screenshots and hides its preview from the Recent apps screen. When you hide a photo that has a copy on the phone, the app moves it into private, app-only storage and removes it from the device's normal gallery, so no other app on the phone can see it. If that photo is backed up, its Proton Drive copy is left untouched, and revealing the photo later restores it and re-links it to that Drive copy.
You can also hide a whole cloud album from view across the app. That is a view filter only: nothing is written to Proton Drive and nothing is moved or deleted. Recently deleted photos live in Proton Drive's trash, which you can browse, restore from, or permanently empty from inside the app. That cloud trash is separate from the Android device trash, and the app gives you both.
App lock and more
App lock guards the whole app behind your fingerprint, face, or device credential, with a timeout you choose, so it re-locks once the app has been in the background past that threshold. The app is available in eleven languages through an in-app language setting that does not depend on your system language, and it ships with light and dark modes (or follow the system) plus eleven colour palettes to pick from.
Photos for Proton pins Proton's security certificates, so it will only connect to genuine Proton servers for your account and your photos. It bundles no analytics, advertising, or crash-tracking libraries and sends no telemetry of its own. The only parts that ever reach outside Proton are the update check, which asks GitHub for the latest release, and the map's background tiles, which come from OpenStreetMap; no photo and no location is ever sent to the map provider. Android's own cloud backup is switched off for the app, and signing out clears the app's decrypted caches from the device.
Tools & extras
Beyond the gallery, Photos for Proton includes a set of focused tools for creating, importing, and managing your photos.
- Collage. Combine 2 to 6 selected photos into a single new image from the selection bar, or place up to 12 by hand in a freeform layout. Choose a grid and an output shape (original, square, 4:5, 9:16, 3:2, or 16:9), reframe each photo, pick a solid or blurred background, and export a full-resolution image to your gallery.
- Import from Google Photos and Ente. Bring a Google Takeout or Ente export straight into Proton Drive with each photo's original date and location preserved, so photos sort to when they were taken rather than the day you imported them. Pick the export .zip, review what will come in (photos already in Drive are marked so you can skip them), and confirm. The import runs in the background, picks up where it left off if it is interrupted, and can rebuild the export's albums for you.
- Duplicate finder. Find redundant photos from Storage in settings. It groups identical copies and near-identical ones (re-encodes, light edits, and burst frames), across both device and cloud photos, and shows the album or folder each copy lives in so the one to keep is obvious. You review and tick copies by hand, and at least one photo in every group is always kept, so a set can never be cleared out entirely.
- Make available offline. Pin a cloud photo so its full-resolution copy stays viewable with no connection, from the viewer or in bulk from a selection. Pinned photos show an offline badge and gather on their own screen, and the space they use, with a Clear action, is shown in Storage settings.
- Open with other apps. Photos for Proton can open images and videos handed to it by other apps, both for viewing and for editing, and can act as your device's gallery app. A "Set as default gallery" option in settings takes you to the system page to make it the default.
- Home-screen widget. Add a widget that cycles through your photos on a schedule you choose (30 minutes, 1 hour, 3 hours, 8 hours, or a day). Show random photos from your device, a set of device photos or a device folder you pick, a set of cloud photos, or a cloud album that stays up to date as you add to it. Cloud photos are drawn from the app's own encrypted cache, so they are never exposed to other apps, and tapping the widget opens that photo.
- Screenshot quick actions. An optional overlay (off by default, turned on in Settings > Extras) that pops the app's action bar over a screenshot the moment you take one in any app, so you can mark it up, share it, back it up to Drive, or turn it into a public link without switching apps. The editor has pen, pixelate, and eraser tools with a colour palette, and redactions are burned into a fresh copy so a hidden area is genuinely removed from what you share.
- Settings search. A search box at the top of Settings jumps straight to any option by name.
