We're building a field inspection app on Retool Mobile for a wind turbine service company.
The problem: Our end user (the technician) has a hard requirement that photos taken inside the app are also saved to the device's native gallery (Android
MediaStore / iOS Photos). The reasons are practical — backup in case the app crashes, and the ability to share photos via WhatsApp with the rest of the crew on
the spot.
Questions:
Is there an officially supported way to save a captured photo directly to the device gallery from Retool Mobile? (Either at capture time, or as a
post-processing step.)
If not, is there a workaround the community uses — e.g., a custom JS transformer, a native bridge, or some integration trick I'm missing?
Is this on the roadmap? If yes, any rough ETA would help me decide whether to wait or migrate the mobile portion of the app to a different stack.
Any guidance appreciated. Happy to share more about the use case if helpful.
Hey @Mateusz, thanks for the detailed report! To answer your question, there's no officially supported way to save a captured photo directly to the device's native gallery. The Image Input component surfaces the captured image inside the app, but writing to the OS gallery isn't an exposed API.
Potential workaround I can think of: nothing is surfaced in our internal mobile channels for this specific case so far. From what I can see on our side, captured images are handled in-memory for upload only, writing them out to the device's native gallery isn't something the mobile app currently supports or exposes to builders. The pattern most people land on for photo handling is uploading to backend storage (Retool Storage, S3, etc.) and sharing a link, though I understand that doesn't really solve the "save locally + share to WhatsApp on the spot" flow you're describing.
I've reached out to our Mobile engineering team internally and will let you know if it's something we can add to the roadmap, since it isn't on there today!
