Import and export

Exporting

“Export viewings” lives on the Settings page, under Data. It downloads your whole watch history (every OMDb-derived field included: poster, ratings, everything), not just whatever’s currently filtered or shown on the overview. The file follows movie-planner’s own canonical field names, documented as a JSON Schema — a file this app exports is readable by the command-line tool, and vice versa.

Importing

The Import page accepts a CSV or JSON file of viewings, up to 25 MB, chosen or dropped onto the box on the page. It names the calendar it will write to (or, with none connected, points you to the connect form), and links a sample CSV to start from. Before writing anything, it checks each row against both your existing calendar and the other rows already in the file, and flags likely duplicates (same title, close enough date) rather than importing them silently. A flagged row starts unchecked — you decide whether “Import anyway” is right for it — while every other row starts checked and ready to go.

Rows are written one at a time, with a progress bar that reads “Importing 12 of 148”. If your calendar server answers that it’s busy (a 423 or 429), the import waits and tries that row again, up to three more times, before it counts the row as failed. It waits as long as the server asks only if the server sends Access-Control-Expose-Headers: Retry-After; otherwise it backs off for 1, 2, then 4 seconds.

Moving over from Letterboxd

Export your data from Letterboxd (Settings, Data, Export Your Data), unzip it, and import its diary.csv here. The page spots it from its columns and asks for a medium, because a diary doesn’t say where you watched. Each entry becomes a viewing on the date you watched it. The year, the rating, the tags (as a note) and the Letterboxd link come along too. There’s no time of day in a diary, so viewings start at midnight. Only the diary file works; ratings.csv has no watched date.

Moving over from IMDb

On IMDb, open your ratings, choose Export, and import the ratings.csv here. It works like a Letterboxd diary: the page asks for a medium. IMDb records the day you rated a title, not the day you watched it, so that is the date each viewing gets. The year, genres, director, IMDb’s own score and your rating (as a note) come along. Change a date afterward if the rating day was wrong.

IMDb also rates TV series, episodes and games. Those aren’t imported. The preview counts them as skipped, not failed, and a folded-away list says what each one is.

Importing through the command-line tool instead

The movie-planner command-line tool reads and writes the same calendar, so a large or pre-existing watch history doesn’t have to go through this app’s Import page at all:

uv run movie-planner import movies.csv --force

import accepts the same CSV/JSON shape as this app’s own export. For a historical import spanning years, --no-metadata skips the OMDb lookup so it doesn’t run into OMDb’s daily request limit — see the command-line tool’s own README for backfilling ratings afterward with sync refresh.

The command-line tool never reads the calendar back on its own except through one command: sync pull reconciles its local store against the calendar, showing each new, changed, or removed entry for approval. Run it after using this app to create, edit, or delete a viewing directly on the calendar, so the command-line tool’s own copy catches up.

Managing venues and media

The Venues page lists every venue you’ve logged a viewing at, with a count of viewings for each, and lets you add or rename entries in your saved venue picklist — the same list this app’s own log form and filter autocomplete draw suggestions from, even for a venue that was only ever logged through the command-line tool and never typed into this app.