Import Your Library, Take It With You

Hot on the heels of Sofa 5.0, I’m bringing a looooooooong time request for Sofa 5.1: Importing data from other services. If you’ve been tracking movies on Letterboxd, books on Goodreads, or keeping all that stuff in Apple Reminders, you can now bring all of it into Sofa.

Import from Other Services

Importing is built for two kinds of people. The first is the longtime tracker who has thousands of items on another service and has been holding off on switching because the thought of re-typing everything is unbearable. The second is the brand-new Sofa user who tried the app, liked it, and quietly realized they’d lose ten years of viewing history if they actually committed. Both of you, I hope, just got unblocked.

The import handles:

• Goodreads — books, ratings, tags, reviews, shelves
• Letterboxd — films, diary entries, ratings, watchlist, custom lists
• Trakt — movies and TV, with full episode-level history
• IMDb, TV Time, Hardcover, StoryGraph, Book Tracker, Movie Tracker — CSV exports from each
• Apple Reminders — pull a Reminders list directly into Sofa, no export step
• Generic CSV / pasted text / .txt / .md files — anything that doesn’t fit a preset

Sofa matches every row in your export against TMDB, iTunes, or IGDB so items land with the right posters, descriptions, and metadata. Nothing gets dropped — if a book is too obscure to find online, Sofa creates a custom item from whatever metadata you provided. There’s a Review step where you can swap any low-confidence match for an alternate, and an Undo button on the success screen if you want to start over.

Learn more about importing your data →

Export All Data

The previous “Plain Text” and “Spreadsheet” export options are replaced by a single, much more complete Export All Data action. The result is a zip you can open in Numbers, Excel, or anywhere else that reads CSV files.

Inside the zip:

• items.csv — every item in your library as one row, with the list and section it lives in, its category, all dates, your notes, tags, links, custom properties, and (for podcasts) your per-show playback settings
• Per-area files for the Planner, Travel & Money, and Media sections
• An attachments/ folder and an images/ folder with every file Sofa is holding for you
• A README.md explaining the schema

The whole point is human readability. Open the zip in Numbers and you can browse your whole library at a glance, filter to a single list, count what you’ve finished this year, or sort by date. If you ever decide Sofa isn’t for you, this is also how you take everything with you.

For full round-trip restores, the .sofa4bk Sofa Backup format is still the right tool. The new export is for reading and analyzing — the backup is for replacing.

Learn more about exporting your data →

• See the full release notes
• Download Sofa Sofa 5.1 from there App Store