Is Proton Drive Good for Private Photos?

What Does Proton Drive Do With Your Photos?

Proton's promise is on its pricing page: "not even Proton can view or edit your files." Its photo backup help page adds the one exception: the photo creation date is not encrypted, so the app can sort your library by time.

Proton's web client is open source, so that promise can be read in the code rather than taken on trust. At the commit we read, the browser parses each photo's EXIF block and copies the GPS latitude and longitude, the camera model, the orientation and the capture time into the file's attributes. Proton's Drive SDK encrypts those attributes with the file's own key before upload and sends the capture time alongside as a plain timestamp, which matches what the help page says. The photo itself is uploaded as its own bytes, sliced into 4 MB blocks and encrypted block by block, so nothing is stripped or re-compressed on the way. That also means the location stays inside the file for anyone you later give it to.

Photo backup runs in the Android and iOS apps, and the filters (Favorites, Video, Raw, Live, Burst) are assigned on your device. You cannot tag photos yourself, and none of the filters is a place. The web app stores your coordinates encrypted but no screen in its photos section reads them back, so there is no map and no grouping by trip or city there.

Viallo is a private photo sharing platform that lets you create photo albums and share them through a link. Recipients can view the full gallery, with location grouping and a map view, without creating an account or downloading an app. Photos are stored at full resolution, and Viallo does not use AI on your photos or train on them. It does not encrypt end to end: its privacy policy lists encryption in transit.

What Did Proton's 2026 Speed Update Change?

Proton's announcement of a shared Drive SDK, published on 29 January 2026, reports "up to 60% faster uploads on iOS and 30% faster uploads and 70% faster downloads on web." Those are Proton's own figures, not a measurement of ours. The same post says the move of every Drive feature onto the SDK runs "over the course of 2026".

Proton Drive vs Google Photos vs iCloud

Every cell below comes from each service's own help, pricing or privacy page, read on 26 October 2026, and the Proton location row also from its web client's source. The exact sentence behind each cell and its link are in the dataset. Prices are in US dollars.

The rows split along one line. Proton is the only one of the four that encrypts photos end to end without a setting to turn on, and it pays for that with sharing: its albums do not reach people outside Proton. Google Photos and iCloud both group photos by place, and Google's own page says it may train on summaries and inferences drawn from your library. For a wider look at storage, see our cloud storage comparison for photos, and for Google specifically, what Google Photos does with AI.

What Proton Drive Gets Right

The metadata is encrypted, not just the pixels. In Proton's web client the coordinates and camera model travel inside the encrypted attributes, and only the capture date is left in the clear. If the places you have been are the private part of your photos, this is the detail that matters.

No AI training. Proton's storage page says Proton Drive "can't use your data to train AI". With end-to-end encryption on the files, that is a technical limit as well as a policy.

One account for the rest of Proton. Proton is based in Geneva, and Proton Unlimited bundles 500 GB of storage with its VPN and other apps for $12.99 a month. The 200 GB Drive plan is $4.99 a month, against $1.99 for Google's 100 GB and $0.99 for Apple's 50 GB, so you pay more per gigabyte for the encryption.

Where Proton Drive Falls Short

Albums stop at the Proton border. Proton's album sharing page says it plainly: "At the moment, you can only share albums with other Proton users. Public link sharing is coming soon." A public link to a file or folder does open without an account, but the person you send it to gets files, not an album.

Shared albums work, inside Proton. You can share an album with up to 100 Proton users, and editors can add their own photos, which count against your storage. A wedding or a group trip works if every guest already has a Proton account.

No view by place. With no place filter and no map in the web app, a two-week trip shows up as a run of dates. For people who think of their photos by where they were taken, that is the gap Google Photos, iCloud and Viallo all fill.

If sharing without accounts is what you need, Viallo's private share links were built for it: you create an album, send the link, and anyone with it views the full gallery, grouped by place with a map, in their browser.

The free plan is small. Proton gives you 5 GB free, the same as iCloud. Google gives you 15 GB shared with Gmail and Drive, and Viallo 10 GB with 2 albums and 200 photos.

How was this checked?

On 26 October 2026 we fetched each service's own pricing, help and privacy pages with curl and kept the exact sentence behind every table cell. We read Proton's open-source web client (ProtonMail/WebClients at commit df5c7ae, 23 October 2026) and the @protontech/drive-sdk 0.23.0 package for what the photo upload does with EXIF. We could not test a Proton account: Proton blocked the automated sign-up on 25 October 2026, so nothing was uploaded, timed or downloaded. The results are in dataset.csv, and check.py re-reads every page and code line.

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