Trakt lets you download everything it has recorded about what you watched, and Movie Tracker reads that download directly. Your history comes across with its original dates, rewatches included.

What gets imported

• The movies you watched, with the day you watched each one.
• The episodes you watched, with their dates, attached to the right series.
• Rewatches, kept as separate viewings on their own dates rather than collapsed into one.
• Watches from a cleared history. Trakt keeps a separate record of what you have seen even after the detailed history is deleted, and Movie Tracker falls back to it, using the last recorded date.

What is not imported

Your ratings, your watchlist, your collection, your comments, your notes, your personal lists, hidden items, and partial progress through an episode you did not finish.

How your titles are matched

By the TMDB identifier that Trakt stores alongside every film and series. TMDB is the catalog Movie Tracker itself uses, so the match is exact and nothing has to be searched for.

Before you start

Import from Trakt first, before you add titles by hand. If a film is already in your library when the import runs, its watch history is added to what is there. Starting with the import is simply less work.

Step 1: download your data from Trakt

1. Sign in to trakt.tv in a browser.
2. Go to Settings, then the Data section, at trakt.tv/settings/data.
3. Request your export. Trakt prepares it and gives you a .zip to download.

Put the file somewhere Movie Tracker can reach, such as iCloud Drive.

Step 2: keep the archive as it is

Do not unzip it, and do not rename the files inside. Movie Tracker identifies the files it needs by the beginning of their names, so an archive that has been extracted and rebuilt may no longer be readable.

The archive also contains your Trakt profile and settings, including your username and location. Movie Tracker does not read those files, but the archive is worth keeping private.

Step 3: import into Movie Tracker

1. Open Movie Tracker.
2. Go to Settings, then Import.
3. Tap Choose Files and pick the .zip.
4. Movie Tracker recognises it as a Trakt export and says so. If it does not, choose Trakt from the list yourself.
5. Tap Continue.

During the import

Trakt splits a long history across several files, and Movie Tracker reads all of them together. It then looks up every title, shows you what it found, and lets you correct any of it before anything is written.

The progress counts titles, not watches. A series you watched three hundred episodes of moves the number once, so on a large history the counter advances in steps with real work between them. A few thousand watches commonly take a few minutes.

A copy of your library is taken first, every time.

After the import

You get a summary of everything that happened, including how many watched episodes went onto their series and how many titles were added or updated.

Titles that could not be brought in are listed at the end. Because the matching is by catalog number, this list is normally short: it happens when an entry has been removed from TMDB since you watched it, or where Trakt and TMDB disagree about which record a number belongs to.

You can save the summary as a PDF, along with a spreadsheet of the rows that need correcting.

If something goes wrong

• The import stops right away with a general error. Check that you picked the Trakt archive and not another .zip.
• The counter sits still for a long time. It is working. Building a series with hundreds of watched episodes takes real time, and the number only moves as each title finishes.
• A film came in without its dates. Its watches were in a history you had cleared. Trakt keeps only the last date in that case, and that is the one you get.