Update 2: After excruciating 20 hours or so I finally managed to download all my photos. I cancelled my subscription, shut down my account and wish you guys all the best!
Update: I assume Safari puts tabs in sleep mode after it doesn't detect activity. As long as I keep my screen unlocked and use Firefox, I can download files. Although, they're very slow since there is not an actual export option. In my opinion, Drive needs a lot of work and Proton needs to make it easier to export out of all their apps!
Sorry, I have to vent right now. I am really sad that I will probably lose my pictures of 2024. I have a Proton Drive subscription, but it's been giving me a lot synchronization problems. I won't go into detail on them, because I have already spent so much time with Support to find a solution. There just isn't any and it's unclear they will ever fix it.
So I decided to cancel my subscription on Proton Drive at least. Turns out it is practically impossible to download my media from Proton Drive. This is my sixth attempt downloading media and it keeps getting canceled close to the end. There is no other export option than to manually select media, download them through the browser and pray that it will finish.
I tried with 500 items, as support recommended me. It didn't work. So I worked my way down to 400, now to 300 and it keeps failing. I don't know how to get my pictures away from this terrible Drive app. It's not doable to work in very small batches. I don't have this time on hand and Proton can't offer any solution either. I cannot even downgrade my subscription if it's using up more than the 15GB storage that they offer.
After I find a way to export all my media, I will close down my Proton account. This is not the way of doing business. In the best I managed to easily download all my media from Google Photos and iCloud. I regret leaving iCloud and at this point, just invest the money in self-hosting solution.
Never Proton Again
For the vast majority of use cases about anything, we rely on a firm and we don't have an option but to trust it to one extend or another. Very few things out there can operate with E2E which isolates us from this trust. This is something often missed by peope in the tech circles, as well as the corrollary that it's the firm that needs to be improved and not the technology, because often there is no practical technological solution. In this regard Proton being a non-profit is on a different level compared to the publicly-traded profit-maximizing multinationals like Google etc. I'm not saying one has to have complete trust in Proton. Instead that one is in a very different boat using a Proton product compared to a Google product.