Migrating from TMDB to Movie Tracker

TMDB is the catalog Movie Tracker itself uses, so this is the most direct import of them all: the numbers in your export are the same numbers the app looks films up by, and nothing has to be guessed.

TMDB sends each list to you by email rather than downloading it, so expect two messages.

What gets imported

  • Your ratings, out of ten, exactly as TMDB keeps them. A rated title comes in as watched, using the date you rated it.
  • Your watchlist, added but not marked as watched.
  • Movies and TV shows, told apart by TMDB’s Type column.

What is not imported

Your custom lists, your favourites, and anything you contributed to the catalog itself.

How your titles are matched

By the TMDb ID. Movie Tracker stores films under the same numbers, so a title in your export and the same title in the app are the same record. Nothing is searched for and nothing is guessed.

Step 1: export your ratings

  1. Sign in to themoviedb.org in a browser.
  2. Click your avatar at the top right and open your Profile.
  3. Go to the Ratings section.
  4. Click the three dot menu and choose Export CSV.
  5. TMDB emails you the file. Save the attachment somewhere Movie Tracker can reach, such as iCloud Drive.

Step 2: export your watchlist

  1. From the same profile, go to the Watchlist section.
  2. Click the three dot menu and choose Export CSV.
  3. TMDB emails you a second file. Save it beside the first.

The two emails may not arrive together. There is no harm in importing one now and the other later: Movie Tracker updates the titles it already has rather than adding them twice.

Step 3: import into Movie Tracker

  1. Open Movie Tracker, go to Settings, then Import.
  2. Tap Choose Files and pick both files at once.
  3. Movie Tracker recognises them as a TMDB export. If it does not, choose TMDB from the list yourself.
  4. Tap Continue.

Do not rename the files. Movie Tracker tells them apart by the beginning of their names, so ratings.csv and ratings (1).csv both work, but my-tmdb-ratings.csv does not.

During the import

A title that appears in both files comes into your library once, carrying what both of them knew: the rating from one, the fact that you had listed it from the other. The progress counts titles, not rows.

After the import

You get a summary of everything that happened. Because the matching is by catalog number, almost nothing should fail. When something does, it is normally a title that has since been removed from TMDB.

You can save the summary as a PDF, along with a spreadsheet of the rows to correct.

If something goes wrong

  • The email never arrived. Check your spam folder, and check the address on your TMDB account. TMDB sends the export to the address it has, not to the one you are signed in with elsewhere.
  • The app does not recognise the file. It must have a TMDb ID column. If you opened the file in a spreadsheet app and saved it again, make sure you saved it as CSV and not as a spreadsheet document.