How to import your Letterboxd history (without losing anything)

Your Letterboxd diary might be a decade of taste — ratings, rewatches, reviews, the watchlist you’ll never finish. Moving that history into a new tracker should take five minutes, not an evening of copy-paste. Here’s exactly how the export works, what’s inside it, and how Kinolog turns it into a working taste profile.

Step one: get your export from Letterboxd

• On the website, open Settings → Data → Export your data (this works on the free tier — no Pro required).
• Letterboxd generates a .zip of CSV files — the important ones are diary.csv (dated watches with ratings and rewatch flags), watched.csv (everything marked seen, dated or not), ratings.csv, reviews.csv (your written text), and watchlist.csv.
• Download it. That zip is the whole move — don’t unzip it, you’ll upload it as-is.

Step two: upload it to Kinolog

In Kinolog, the import lives in Settings (and it’s offered right at welcome, because starting from zero is miserable). Upload the zip; the importer reads all the CSVs and reconciles them into one diary:

• Diary entries keep their dates; ratings keep their half-stars; rewatches stay rewatches.
• Watched-but-undated films stay honestly undated— they’re imported with watch date “unknown” rather than stamped with today, so your stats and year-in-review never lie about when.
• Reviews come along as notes — and notes are the highest-value taste signal an AI recommender can read, so an imported review-writer starts with a shockingly good profile on day one.
• Ambiguous titles get reviewed by you, not guessed. When a CSV row could match two films (remakes, same-title re-releases), it lands in a review queue for a human decision instead of silently polluting your history.

Big libraries are fine — the importer is tested against multi-thousand-row exports, and a botched upload can be re-run safely: imports are idempotent, so nothing duplicates.

Step three: check the seams

Two minutes of hygiene after any import, on any platform: scan the review queue for those ambiguous matches, spot-check a few favorites for the right rating, and skim your watchlist for things you’ve since seen. Then you’re done — recommendations from your very first ask are grounded in your real history instead of an onboarding quiz.

Why this matters more than it seems

Trackers compete on features, but they should be judged on custody: your diary is a long-term document that will outlive any app’s roadmap, including ours. Import without loss, export without friction — that’s the whole covenant. If you’re weighing a move, here’s our honest guide to the alternatives, including the cases where staying put is the right call.