Study your Anki decks in the browser
If you already have decks in Anki, you don't have to rebuild them. R3CK0N's Flashcards section reads Anki's own export files directly, and everything happens in your browser — the file never leaves your machine except to sync your own account if you're signed in.
Open FlashcardsTwo export formats, two results
Anki desktop offers more than one way to get a deck out, and they carry different amounts of information. Which one you pick determines what shows up on the other side.
| Export format | What it carries |
|---|---|
| Anki Deck Package (.apkg) | Cards, tags, notetypes, sub-decks, and — this is the important part — each card's scheduling state and its complete review history |
| Notes in Plain Text (.txt) | Just the note content: front, back and tags. No scheduling, no history — cards start fresh |
If you want your decks to pick up exactly where Anki left off — same due dates, same memory strength for every card — export a Package. If you just want the card content and are happy to have the scheduler start learning from scratch, plain text is simpler and works from any spreadsheet or CSV too.
Step by step
1. Export from Anki desktop
In Anki, go to File → Export. Choose either Anki Deck Package (.apkg) or Notes in Plain Text (.txt) as the export format, pick the deck (or "All Decks"), and save the file somewhere you can find it.
2. Open the import panel
Go to /flashcards and open the Import tab. Drop the exported file in, or use the file picker — .apkg, .colpkg, .txt and .csv are all recognized automatically.
3. Check the preview
Before anything is written, you'll see the decks found in the file with their card and review counts, one checkbox per deck so you can skip any you don't want, and a toggle: "Keep Anki's scheduling and history", on by default for a Package import. Turn it off if you'd rather every card start as new.
4. Import
Confirm, and the decks appear in your deck list ready to study. A short summary tells you how many notes, cards and reviews came in, plus anything that got skipped.
What carries over, and what doesn't
From a Package (.apkg) import, with history kept:
- Cards and content — basic, reversed and cloze cards render the same front and back text.
- Tags — carried over exactly, for filtering later.
- Scheduling state — each card's memory strength and difficulty come in either straight from Anki's own FSRS data, reconstructed from its review history, or estimated from its interval if neither is available — whichever the file actually contains.
- Full review history — every past answer, so your statistics don't start from zero.
What doesn't come in, from either format:
- Images and audio — import is text only. A card that depends entirely on a picture or a sound clip will show up empty and gets counted as skipped rather than imported broken.
- Add-ons and Anki-specific settings — anything that lived in an Anki add-on doesn't have an equivalent here.
A plain-text import never carries scheduling or history regardless of what the original deck's state was in Anki — the format itself doesn't include that information, so every imported card starts as new.
How the statistics compare
Once a deck is in, the Stats panel shows the same shape of numbers Anki's own graphs do: reviews per day, card counts by state, interval and difficulty histograms, answer-button breakdowns, hourly patterns and true retention. If you imported with history kept, those graphs reflect your entire Anki past, not just what you've done since importing — so a deck you've used for years shows up with years of data, not a fresh start.
It all happens in your browser
Both file formats are read entirely on your device: the .apkg reader unzips the file and opens the SQLite database it contains using an in-browser SQLite engine, and the plain-text reader just parses the file directly. Nothing is uploaded to a server to be processed — the only network activity is your own account syncing the resulting decks, if you're signed in. A large collection with years of history can take a few seconds to parse; a progress line keeps you posted while it works.
Anki has changed its export format more than once over the years — older exports store decks and notetypes as embedded JSON, newer ones use dedicated database tables, and the newest compress the database itself. The import panel detects which variant it's looking at automatically, so it doesn't matter how old the Anki version that made the export was.
If something doesn't come through right
The import summary tells you exactly what happened: how many notes, cards and reviews were read, and a count of anything skipped. A card usually gets skipped because its content depended entirely on media that isn't imported — a picture with no text, or an audio-only pronunciation card. If a whole deck looks wrong, the safest fix is to delete the imported copy from the deck list and re-export from Anki, rather than trying to patch it card by card; nothing about a failed import touches your original Anki collection.
Frequently asked questions
Will this mess up my Anki collection?
No. Export only reads from Anki; nothing is written back to it. Your Anki collection is untouched either way.
Can I import more than one deck at once?
Yes — a Package with multiple decks (or "All Decks") shows every deck in the preview with its own checkbox, so you can bring in some and skip others in one import.
What happens to cards with images if I import anyway?
Anything left over after stripping images and audio is checked for content; if nothing meaningful remains, the card is skipped and counted in the import summary rather than imported blank.
Can I export back out to Anki later?
Yes — the deck editor can export a deck as Anki-style plain text, which Anki's own importer reads.
Import your decks