Proton Drive extremely slow at loading thumbnails & previewing photos

Al3xios

Hey everyone,

I'm reaching out hoping someone else might be experiencing this issue, as I've tried various troubleshooting steps without success. Recently, I transferred my entire Google Photos library to Proton Drive, and now the app itself has become completely unusable for me.

The loading times are now extremely slow, taking anywhere from 30 seconds to over a minute to load thumbnails or open/preview files. I've tried deleting the cache multiple times, clearing data, I also tried enabling the exploit protection compatibility mode and even uninstalling and reinstalling the app, but nothing seems to work.

I am on the latest GOS stable channel with a Pixel 8 Pro and my internet connection is very good. Given that I've ruled out the problem being with my device or internet speed, I'm starting to suspect that the issue lies within the app itself or within graphene OS (though I didn't try the app on other non GOS phones because I have none).

Has anyone else experienced similar slowdowns or issues with Proton Drive? Any potential workarounds or suggestions for resolving this problem would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance for your help!

Byteang3l

Al3xios what everyone else has said is accurate, I've had the same experience on multiple devices. Proton has weird priorities when it comes to QC, I like them but they have things that need to be worked on. They have a user voice page but idk if they ever really acknowledge it.

Skorp

As far as I can tell, this is just the experience of the app. I ended up leaving Proton Drive for managing my photos and use Ente Photos instead in part due to this. They give you 10GB to start, have much better features for organizing and managing photos, and the performance is much better.

Al3xios

Skorp If this is actually the real experience of the app there's no way it can be my photos app daily driver. It's really unusable. Looks like I'm on 56k modem. Embarassing. And that's very sad because I love every other proton product. I hope they will fix it soon because at the moment there's really no point at using it. Anyway thank you for your help!

Alvyn

Skorp same here. I also ended up with using proton drive just for documents and ente photos for photos and videos. I think Proton took so many different products to maintain and develop.

DeletedUser475

I just took a look at my Proton Drive app, and the Photos thumbnails loaded reasonably fast, no more than 2 or 3 seconds for all thumbs visible to be rendered. But I regularly move my photos, the ones I want to keep, over to the 'My Files' or Files tab. I only have around 60 photo's under the Photo tab.

While drive works great for backing up my photos, it is not good for viewing them. It has a long way to go.

Skorp

DeletedUser475

Yeah I was dealing more with thousands of photos and it would often take 5+ seconds to load a new page or section.

Al3xios

DeletedUser475 I think this is the main issue here. I have thousands of photos, which took me days to transfer only to find out that now I have a useless photo app. They should at least warn the users if their photo app can't properly handle large photo collections. My god what a waste of time.

BeepBeep

Proton periodically puts out product roadmap update blogs (kudos). The midyear updates just dropped. Drive performance updates for Photos are slated for this summer:

https://proton.me/blog/drive-roadmap-summer-2025

Byteang3l

BeepBeep nice to see them mention a Linux app, I'm curious how it all pans out.

Al3xios

BeepBeep Yep I saw their blog post and I'm quite confident now that they will fix these issues. I'll be more than happy to wait a couple of months if they manage to improve it.

iruszz

BeepBeep
It's 18 November now. As stated in the Roadmap:
"This summer, we're rolling out performance upgrades that make Photos and Docs load faster and feel smoother across devices, whether you're scrolling through years of images or jumping between documents."

The app is still insanely slow...
I don't think much has been done 😅
I also spend days downloading files over from Google to Proton drive. I think it was time wasted as I am not able to view or delete photos.

krysor

Actually it got somewhat faster at loading the thumbnails but compared to Google Photos or iOS Photos it's still slow as hell. The functionality is kinda limited. Uploading pictures and videos to the "pictures" tab only possible on mobile. I have tons of pictures and videos uploaded to Proton drive that I haven't synced with the Photos tab as it skips many pictures and videos but it doesn't say why or what it skipped. No option to look for duplicates etc.