Ratings: Import history and data from other sites

It's very disappointing to see how long people have been requesting this feature for. I'd love to jump ship from Listal to IMDB but there's no way that I'm rating all those films manually again.

This is a feature I've been waiting for almost as long as I've been a member of IMDb. See, back in the day when I first began keeping track of every movie I'd ever seen (retroactively including thousands of titles), IMDb didn't have a simple way of "checking off" each film as I watched them. This is precisely why I turned to iCheckMovies - it provided all of that missing functionality in one place, as well as allowing both the importing and exporting of lists.

Now that IMDb has watchlists and other ways for users to keep track of such things, I would like to take my list of 5k titles (which, when exported from iCheckMovies, contains the IMDb ID of each) and import it here. Given that IMDb provides the ability to export a list, it baffles me as to why such a simple, obvious, and much-requested feature should remain unavailable for this long, especially if the list being imported contains the IMDb ID for each item.

On top of that, I'd actually make the argument that by not implementing this feature, IMDb is in fact driving users away from the site. In this one thread I've read several comments to the effect that, as long as such an ability remains unavailable, users with large lists on other sites will just stay at the other sites instead of migrating here, because the thought of having to manually enter thousands upon thousands of titles one at a time is understandably daunting and frustrating.

I've recently dabbled in some basic JavaScripting with Grease/Tampermonkey scripts, some of which involve the inputting and/or outputting of IMDb IDs to and from the site, so I'll try my (admittedly inexperienced) hand at coming up with a workaround for this glaring omission on an otherwise feature-filled, user-friendly site. If I have any luck, the users in this thread will be the first to know. In the meantime, though - please, oh Great Ones of IMDb, hear and answer our prayer!

I expect one of the reasons that this is so slow in coming is due to a decision that IMDb made when creating the List system. They decided to allow multiple copies of a Title (or Person, etc) in a list. I can see where that could be handy occasionally (e.g. a list of watched films where the user wants to record each time they watch a Title), but I believe most people will normally only want a single copy of an item per list.

Because of this decision, it will be difficult to update a list, all that can be done easily is to append to it. This could also create problems in an upload, as if the system times out, and the user re-uploads they may end up with a lot of duplicates. I think the best solution would be to allow an option to restrict a list to unique items (by Constant).

A while ago,  it was suggested that IMDb could just upload the same format as the exported list, but this would be a major waste of bandwidth.

For example, an exported Title List contains the following fields:

• Position - Position of this record in the custom sort.
  
• Const - the unique key to the Title
  
• Created - date the record was created - see below for discussion
  
• Modified - not necessary on input - would be replaced by the time it is uploaded
  
• Description - User added description
  
• Title  - not stored in list - copied from Title page
  
• Title type  - not stored in list - generated from Title data
  
• Directors - not stored in list - copied from Title data
  
• You Rated - not stored in this list, only on Rated list - copied from there
  
• Imdb Rating - not stored on list - copied from Title data
  
• Runtime (mins) - not stored on list - copied from Title data
• Year - not stored on list - copied from Title data
• Genres - not stored on list - copied from Title data
• Num Votes - not stored on list - copied from Title data
• Release Date (month/day/year) - not stored on list - copied from Title data
• URL - not stored on list - can be generated from the Const

As you can see, only 4 fields have any relevance to an upload: Position, Const, Description and possibly Created. The first 3 of these fields are the only ones that the User enters. It is possible that IMDb might use the Created field to allow updates. Since currently it takes more than 1 second to add a record to a list, all Created times should be unique for that list and the system should be able to check for a match on both Const and Created and if it is found Update that record, otherwise append the record (changing Created to the current time).

The problem is that once uploads are permitted several records could be added within one second, so the Created field would not be unique. Of course they might implement a uniqueness check and pause if appending the current record will create a duplicate Const+Created combination. Or they could simply warn that the Update might not work correctly if the list contains multiple items for the same Const.

While I have only specified Title Lists above, the other types are the same in principle, with only the same few fields being required for an upload.

P.S. I too really wish that IMDb would implement some system to upload lists, it would help me a lot.

Hi IMDb team. 
In the kinopoisk.ru site they have a feature that makes it possible to import the ratings from the IMDb site, so it is not necessary to check and rate it all again. I was wondering: is it possible to import my history from kinopoisk to IMDb? 

Recently one of the biggest russian movie base Kinopoisk was literally ruined by it's owners.
Now a lot of dissapointed users are considering  to move to IMDB.
So, there's a problem - each of us has the list of over 1 000 rated movies, we would like to import all of it information to IMDB.
The list is in Excel.

Dear Imdb team!

I'd like to second the proposal of importing movie ratings from an Excel file. Although, actually, any solution which would let us transfer a lot of data at once will help, not necessarily import from Excel (for example, you can create a... let's say a 100-line input form into which we will copy-paste 2 columns with grades and movie titles, press OK and get the films graded).
The reason for this is the same as that of the previous person: the big Russian movie web site Kinopoisk we used to use was ruined by its new owners. At the moment it is temporarily back to its old design but that's not for long. So basically tens of thousands of people are left hom.. ehhm, siteless. The only thing we have is several Excel files with our movie/celebrity folders and movie rankings. Many people have a lot of movies in such lists (I have over 2100 rated movies, more than 500 actors/directors in different folders and more than 700 movies in different folders). Manual transfer will take an eternity.
Many kinopoisk ex-users are planning on moving to imdb. Please help us do it. You are our last hope.
We just really love movies and can't live without a good movie database website.:)

With best regards and greatest hopes,
Mindeveler.

I have my collection on Listal and (just checked) the site export includes IMDB codes.
No problem if imdb doesn't import automatically Listal exports, but some kind of csv or xml import should be implemented, please!

Dear IMDB we are really looking for the option of moving our data to your website, the former Kinopoisk.ru users. Please help.

To all those wishing to import Kinopoisk lists to IMDb, I just stumbled across this program on GitHub, which was designed specifically for that purpose. I have not tried it myself (nor can I read the page without the use of a translator), but I thought I'd point it out in case it works. Good luck!

I've been a member of IMDb for 14 years. In all this time, they still don't let you import? Four years ago, the official response was "sorry". When will this be a feature? I would love to import my list of movies and start actively using this site... how many more years do I have to wait?

Hey. I wrote a little script for transfering movie ratings between some sites. Try it out: https://github.com/StegSchreck/RatS

OK, up until a little while ago, I could bulk import to title lists.  I can't demonstrate anymore, but earlier in this thread I created a very large list in a few minutes as a proof of concept.  I regularly updated my lists from files of tt numbers.  Recent changes (December 2017) to IMDb protocols broke what I was doing.  It would be a lot easier for them to implement this than for us to reverse engineer it, but if I have to do that again, I will.

It used to be you could do a GET on a URL of the form "http://www.imdb.com/list/_ajax/edit?const=tt$title&list_id=ls$list&ref_tag=title" if you had the right cookies loaded (for your IMDb account credentials).  In Perl, I used LWP::UserAgent and maintained a cookie jar file that I initially loaded from the cookies in my web browser.  Not super easy for the uninitiated, but not difficult once you get it set up.  (That may still work if my cookies are hosed somehow.  Try it if you want to help debug.)

Looks like it should be done with a POST now, but I haven't sat down and figured it out yet.  Does that make enough sense to anyone that they want to help out?  Since my earlier posts, I know a few people wrote me and I shared my scripts, but I'm not sure I kept records of whom.

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled importing movies to IMDB list.

I own a large collection of movies. Can I import a CSV, XML or any other format into one of my lists, or do I have to manually enter every movie?

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled Import ratings.

Is there a (semi-)official way to import ratings into the IMDb?

(I have several thousand in a local database and would like to upload them)