Automatically back up your photos to Proton Drive on Android.
Another day, another Proton update. This time, the Proton Drive app is rolling out a new “photo backup” feature for Android devices.
Proton Drive’s new photo backup feature is a privacy-focused alternative to Google Photos. Images from your phone are protected by end-to-end encryption before they’re uploaded to Proton Drive, meaning that they cannot be accessed by Proton (or leaked in the event of a data breach). You can also share photos with full end-to-end encryption through Proton Drive. For reference, Google Photos doesn’t use end-to-end encryption.
Photos saved to Proton Drive can be accessed on all of your devices. A new “Photos” tab in the Proton Drive app serves as your image gallery—it organizes all of your images in a “monthly grid view” and allows you to download, preview, or delete photos and videos on the fly. You can also save photos to an encrypted “access offline” collection. It’s simple but straightforward.
Of course, Proton Drive lacks many of Google Photos’ more advanced features. It can’t acknowledge people or pets in your photos, and it won’t create a slideshow of your most recent vacation. These features demand cloud-based image processing, which doesn’t really jive with end-to-end encryption.
If you’re seriously interested in privacy and security, switching to Proton Drive might be a good idea. That said, I strongly propose that you sign up for Proton Unlimited, which includes all of Proton’s privacy-focused services and is currently on sale for $120. If you sign up for Proton Drive on its own, you’ll pay $60 a year for 200GB of storage—Google offers the same amount of cloud storage for half the price.
Proton Drive’s photo backup feature is currently rolling out on Android. It’s available for both free and paid users. Unfortunately, the Proton team hasn’t announced a release date for photo backup on iOS. Maybe it will be listed in an upcoming product roadmap.
Proton Drive
The Proton Drive cloud storage service protects your files with full end-to-end encryption. Try it for free, sign up for an individual membership, or unite a family strategize with up to five users.
