RealRetrieve

Thanks for sharing your idea.

I’m curious what you had in mind, what kind of tags or categories would you imagine adding during the export itself?

One thing I’m thinking through is that many photo library apps (like Google Photos, Apple Photos, Lightroom, etc.) rely on their own internal databases and tagging systems, which don’t always map cleanly to file-level tags. That’s partly why RealRetrieve focuses on reconstructing the core metadata so those apps can do their job properly.

Still, I’d love to hear how you would expect tagging or categorization to work in practice that kind of input is really helpful for shaping future features.

Good question. RealRetrieve doesn’t organize photos by renaming files or sorting them into folders. It’s not about us categorizing your photos, but it’s about enabling you to do that properly.

In the GDPR export, the image files and their metadata (like timestamps and locations) are separated. RealRetrieve links those back together and embeds the original capture date/time and location directly into the photo files, where that data exists.

The result is a clean photo set that behaves like normal camera photos when imported into Google Photos, Apple Photos, or any other photo library app (or even in Finder or your file manager), and full freedom for you to organize and categorize them however you want.

I’m glad that resonates, that’s exactly why I built RealRetrieve. :)

If you end up trying it, I’d love to hear your feedback on how intuitive the process feels.
Requesting the data from BeReal can be a bit tedious, but there’s a short step-by-step guide for that part here: https://realretrieve.com/tutorial