What keeps someone on a tracker is almost never the tool: it's the years of history they put into it. Switching means losing them — which is exactly why people stay on a service they no longer like. WatchTrail now reads exports from five services. Here is what each one actually contains, and what it does not.
The real criterion: by identifier, not by title
An import that looks up “Dune” by title may find the 1984 film, the 2021 one, or a documentary. An import that reads the identifier in the file does not get it wrong. Every serious export carries one — TMDB, IMDb, TheTVDB — and that is what we use, with the title as a last resort only. It is the difference between a correct library and an almost-correct one you will spend months fixing by hand.
Trakt: the most faithful migration
A Trakt CSV export carries season, episode, watch date and identifiers. That is everything needed: the history arrives episode by episode with its dates, and statuses (watching, completed) recompute on their own. Nothing is lost.
Simkl: everything except the episode detail
Simkl exports movies, shows, their status and how far you got — but not the episode-by-episode history: only the last episode watched per show. We infer that the earlier ones in that season were watched, which is what Simkl itself states, and only one date is known: the last view. The library is correct, the timeline is thinner. That is a limit of the export, not of the import.
IMDb: movies, never episodes
IMDb has no notion of a watched episode. Its exports say “this title is in my list” or “I rated it 8” — nothing more. In practice: your ratings become watched movies, your watchlist becomes movies to watch, and shows arrive as “to watch” with no history. Reconstructing one would mean inventing it, and an invented history is worse than a missing one.
Letterboxd: movies, cleanly
The official Letterboxd export contains movies with their year and watch date. Drop it as-is. Letterboxd does not track shows — that is not what it is for — so there is nothing else to recover.
Serializd: there is nothing to import
Serializd offers no export feature to date. This is not an oversight on our side: there is simply no file to drop. We could scrape a public profile, but it would be brittle and would recover no dates at all. It is worth weighing before putting years of tracking there: a service you cannot get your data out of is holding it.
And if you are coming from TV Time
TV Time shut down on July 15, 2026 and its servers are wiped: no export request is possible any more. Two paths remain — the ZIP you may have downloaded before the shutdown, which drops in as-is, and the CSVs produced by “TV Time Liberator” from the app cache still on your phone. Both are recognised.
- Several files at once: they are merged, without duplicates.
- The import is re-runnable: running it again never writes the same row twice.
- The final screen gives the exact count of what came through, and the list of what was not found.