The 10 Most-Requested Recall Features in 2026 — and Which Already Exist Elsewhere

Recall runs its product feedback in public — a Canny board where users file requests and vote on them. That makes it one of the most honest documents in this category: not what a vendor says people want, but what paying users ask for, ranked by how many of them ask.

We read the board on 25 August 2026 and pulled the ten most-voted open requests. For each one: what it is, its status on Recall's side, and — honestly — which tools already ship it. Including the ones where the answer is "nobody does."

1. Subscribe to content that gets auto-added (625 votes, under review)

The most-voted request by a wide margin: subscribe to RSS feeds, newsletters, YouTube channels and podcasts, and have new content summarized and added automatically. This is the "stop making me save things manually" request, and it is where the whole category is heading.

Who ships it: nobody ships the full version. BrainTube ships the YouTube half — connect your account and playlists import and keep syncing, so a video you add on your phone turns up queryable without another save action. RSS, newsletter and podcast subscriptions remain open territory for everyone, us included.

2. Bulk summaries from a YouTube playlist (388 votes, under review)

Paste a playlist, get every video imported. The most concrete request on the board.

Who ships it: BrainTube does, and goes further than a one-shot import because the playlist stays connected. Rescroll — the creator tool formerly at thesecondbrain.io — does a one-time bulk import of up to 50 videos from a channel. Recall lists the request as under review.

3. Save digital books — epub, mobi, Kindle (372 votes)

Books are the largest untapped source in most people's libraries, and the one most likely to be sitting in a proprietary format.

Who ships it: partially, everywhere. Most tools here handle PDFs; native epub and mobi ingestion with highlight sync is genuinely rare. If your books live in Readwise, its export path is the practical bridge today.

4. A desktop app (346 votes)

Who ships it: Recall and BrainTube are both browser-first. Obsidian and Heptabase are the desktop-native options in the adjacent space. If a native window matters more to you than capture breadth, that is a real reason to choose a differently-shaped tool.

5. A recycle bin for deleted cards (309 votes)

Deleted means gone, today. It is a small feature with outsized trust implications — people archive things they care about, and a library you are afraid to prune is a library that gets messy.

6. Import a list of URLs (305 votes, in progress)

The Pocket-shutdown request: paste a CSV or a list of links, get cards. Recall marks this in progress and shipped a first step in August 2026, capped at 10 URLs at a time. BrainTube's bulk ingest runs over its MCP server and API as well as the app, which matters when an assistant or a script is doing the importing rather than you.

7. Mind-map view alongside the summary (296 votes)

Users want the visual layer and the text layer together — a map they can move through, with the summary attached rather than in a different view.

Who ships it: Recall already has a card-level graph for visual exploration, so this request is really about integration rather than absence. BrainTube's graph is built for retrieval rather than browsing: it links entities so search can traverse them, which powers better answers but is not the explorable canvas being asked for here. Heptabase is the strongest option in the category if a spatial canvas is the primary way you think.

8. Highlighting in the source text and transcript (280 votes, planned)

Recall lets you highlight in its notebook layer but not in the source itself. Marked planned.

Who ships it: nobody in this comparison ships true in-source highlighting. BrainTube solves a cousin of the problem — answers cite the exact transcript timestamp, so you can click from a claim back to the moment it was said — but that is retrieval, not annotation. If marking up the source document is central to how you read, this gap is real across the board.

9. Multi-tag AI suggestions on every card type (261 votes)

Auto-tagging that works consistently regardless of what kind of thing you saved, and suggests several tags rather than one.

Who ships it: partially. BrainTube auto-generates tags on ingestion across source types and exposes a tagging tool over MCP, so an assistant can retag in bulk — which is the version that scales once a library gets past a few hundred items. Consistency across every card type is a fair criticism of most tools here, including ours.

10. OCR on images (254 votes, in progress — and partly shipped)

Credit where due: Recall shipped image OCR on 19 August 2026, making photos and screenshots searchable. The remaining ask is OCR on images embedded inside social posts, which their notes say is next.

What the board tells you

Read the ten together and a pattern falls out. Eight of them are about getting content in — subscriptions, playlists, books, URL lists, images. Two are about working with it once it is there. Almost nothing on the list is about better summarization.

That is the useful signal for anyone choosing a tool right now. The summarizing is broadly solved. What separates these products in 2026 is capture breadth, what happens automatically, and whether the library you build stays reachable by the other software you use.

One more thing worth doing before you commit an archive anywhere, including here: read the vendor's public feature board. It tells you what the product does not do, ranked by how much its own paying users mind. That is more informative than any comparison page, ours included.

How these figures were checked

Vote counts and statuses were read from Recall's public feature-request board on 25 August 2026, and release facts from their public changelog. Recall ships roughly every two weeks, so treat any "under review" above as movable — several of these may have shipped by the time you read this. Claims about BrainTube describe functionality running in production on the same date.

If you spot something here that has gone stale, tell us and we will correct it with the date attached.