Migrating from DVDpedia to Movie Tracker

DVDpedia exports your collection as a single spreadsheet. Movie Tracker reads it and rebuilds each title from its own catalog, so what you get is your collection with current information rather than a copy of what DVDpedia had stored.

What gets imported

  • Movies and TV shows. A title with an IMDb code is identified exactly. One without is treated as a movie and matched by name.
  • Whether you watched it, and when, from the Last Seen date.
  • How many times you watched it, from Play Count. Four plays become four viewings, and the one with a date is the last of them.
  • Your rating, converted from DVDpedia’s five point scale to the ten point scale Movie Tracker uses. Four stars becomes 8.
  • Your comments, kept as a note.
  • Your tags.
  • Your collections, brought in as Spaces.
  • The date you added it to your collection.

What is not imported

Everything specific to the disc: the format, the region, the box, the loan history, the purchase price. Movie Tracker tracks what you watched rather than what is on your shelf, and fetches the cast, the summary and the poster from its catalog.

How your titles are matched

By the IMDb code where your file has one, which is exact. Otherwise by title and Theatrical year, and the year is what tells apart films that share a name. Enabling the Theatrical column before you export is the single thing that most improves the result.

Step 1: show every column

DVDpedia only exports the columns it is showing.

  1. Open DVDpedia.
  2. Press Command J to open the column settings.
  3. Turn on every column, or at least Title, IMDb, Theatrical, My Rating, Last Seen, Play Count, Tags, Collection Names, Comments and Date Added.

Step 2: switch DVDpedia to English

Movie Tracker recognises the English column names. If DVDpedia is running in another language, its headings are translated and the app cannot tell which column is which.

  1. Open System Settings, then General, then Language & Region.
  2. Under Applications, add DVDpedia and set its language to English.
  3. Restart DVDpedia.

You can set it back afterwards. The language only matters at the moment you export.

Step 3: export

  1. In DVDpedia, choose File, then Export Collection.
  2. Choose the CSV format.
  3. Save the file somewhere Movie Tracker can reach, such as iCloud Drive.

Step 4: import into Movie Tracker

  1. Open Movie Tracker, go to Settings, then Import.
  2. Tap Choose Files and pick the CSV you exported.
  3. Movie Tracker recognises it as a DVDpedia export. If it does not, choose DVDpedia from the list yourself.
  4. Tap Continue.

After the import

You get a summary of everything that happened, and any title the catalog could not place is listed there by the name your file gave it. Titles matched by name rather than by code are the ones most likely to need a look.

You can save the summary as a PDF, along with a spreadsheet of the rows that need correcting, so you can add those few by hand afterwards.

If something goes wrong

  • The app does not recognise the file. DVDpedia was almost certainly not in English when you exported. Go back to step 2.
  • Half the columns are missing. DVDpedia exports what it shows. Go back to step 1 and export again.
  • A title came in as the wrong film. It had no IMDb code and shares its name with something else. Correct it on the review screen before importing, or afterwards in your library.