I have had an app idea on my mind for a little while now with this premise: Thanks to laws like GDPR, tech companies are required to provide the ability for their users to download their data. In an effort to ensure I “own” anything I have uploaded to social media, I periodically download my data from platforms such as Instagram and Facebook. The issue with the platforms is that they do not have a standard data format, images properties such as location, their description or even dates they were taken, are not particularly easy to save or import into your local file system. Below is an example of a Instagram export and how the filesystem is structured 🙁
Just finding the images is time consuming and tedious. Both Instagram and Facebook exports do offer an HTML page where each of your posts can be viewed, but likewise, if you wanted to save all of your images to your local PC, it would take a considerable effort to “Right Click” and “Save As”.
Due to this nuance, and give me back more control over my content, I have been planning and infrequently dreaming of a small utility application which would process these social media export files, and subsequently provide a set of commonly usable image files which end users would be more used to. Thanks to Claude Code, my ideas are no longer just sitting in my Obsidian notebook collecting dust, building an app like this took roughly 4 to 5 hours. Well worth the investment of time and the $20 Pro plan 🙂
The app processes each of the images from the HTML or JSON export, and subsequently modifies the file properties, such as Creation date, adds comments (depending on what was in the social post) and also adds EXIF properties to the image file. This allows other apps (like Mac Photos) to have the proper image context, allow location search or filtering, define a descriptive filename and view image descriptions.
I plan to make some additional modifications, customizable options, on-boarding workflow to help explain where users can download their data, etc.
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