Importing a List to IMDb

Archived and Closed

This conversation is no longer open for comments or replies and is no longer visible to community members. The community moderator provided the following reason for archiving: Old thread

Before the My Movies system changed to the current Lists system, it used a CGI interface for modifying things. This made it (relatively) easy to add entries in bulk to a list. Now it is impossible- the only way to do it is with a bunch of mouse clicks.

Why is there no way to import a list given a set of tt numbers? Why can't I convert something like the description of this List: http://www.imdb.com/list/ST6QmibWT-Q/ into a List? I understand the import format may need to be very narrow to keep implementation from being hairy, but it sure looks like the code is already there to do the bulk of it.

abbyb

21 Posts
24 Reply Likes
frustrated

Posted 7 years ago

7 years ago

Emperor, Champion

6418 Posts
3021 Reply Likes

That is the oddest list I've ever seen. I have lists with thousands of entries in them and I've added them all in by hand. The quickest way to import something like that into a list would be editing that list and copy and pasting the URLs into the search box, which saves searching by name.

Now I'd love to have a way to import list data as you could save off your lists (as you can currently do) and import them in if anything happened (I have seen comments from at least one person who accidentally deleted a list). However, even if they had such a system you'd never be able to just throw it that random list you link to, it'd need to be formatted properly, which would probably be more time consuming than just copy and pasting the links into the search box. So whatever system they'd use, you'd still have to do the bulk of the hard work.

2013-02-19T15:37:57+00:00

abbyb

21 Posts
24 Reply Likes

It's not random- it's a list of tt numbers I pasted into the editor. If you saw the source, it'd make more sense. I don't see why canonical titles wouldn't work too, but the list system recognizes the tt numbers and makes them into links to the IMDb (not that that's hard to do). They uniquely identify movies and are in a rigid format. There's no reason they couldn't be used to describe a list. In the old system, that's all a list apparently was- a set of tt numbers. Now it's a tablish thing, but each entry still has one, right?!

So why not let someone upload a CSV file where one column has to be tt numbers or canonical titles? Isn't that all that's happening internally here? Sure looks like what it exports...

7 years ago

abbyb

21 Posts
24 Reply Likes

OK, I have a list of thousands of tt numbers here and want to make an IMDb list from it. There's no way to do it without, as you say, copying and pasting thousands of URLs. Under the CGI interface, you could add or delete movies from lists by tt number easily- that's how my other lists with hundreds or thousands of entries were made.

My point is, there's no technical stumbling block here on the IMDb end- they can do it, but with the current interface users just can't.

It'd also answer all these concerns about re-ordering lists, etc,, because users could export them, get them in the order they want, and re-import them- as well as providing for other kinds of external list management (would you like your Netflix queue as a List or vice versa?) or backup.

And, I repeat, I think it's technologically easy. Easy to implement + provides utility = desirable feature for everyone.

7 years ago

Emperor, Champion

6418 Posts
3021 Reply Likes

As I say here, I'm all for being able to import lists:
https://getsatisfaction.com/imdb/topi...

If you've exported a list from IMDB or have a CSV file with tt IDs in then this shouldn't be too difficult. Even with just that basic functionality it'd allow some enterprising soul to create a web-based bit of code that could help people convert other film lists from other sites into a format that could be uploaded into IMDB.

That'd just be a minimum, but if they made a more fully-featured bit of kit themselves that'd allow moving lists around the Amazon family of sites, that'd be very useful and would then be easy enough to tweak to allow lists of films from other sites to be imported straight to IMDB.

7 years ago

Keester

209 Posts
100 Reply Likes

Importing should be allowed. You can export to create a backup of your lists. An import function is then required to restore your list in case of a failure and your list is somehow lost.