Data ingestion: your activity on the timeline

Ingestion pulls data from services you already use and places it on your timeline, next to your notes, receipts, and everything else from that day.

The first source is Netflix. Your viewing history becomes one note per watch, on the day you watched it.

Ingestion is different from imports: imports bring your notes over from another app once, while ingestion pulls activity data from a service and can be re-run whenever you download a fresh export.

Import your Netflix history

You can import from the app or the command line - both do the same thing.

From the app. Open the Timeline and click Import. Pick the source (Netflix), choose your downloaded file, and optionally press Preview to see what will happen before you commit. Then click Import.

From the command line:

1. On Netflix, open Account → Profile → Viewing activity, then choose Download all. This gives you a CSV file for that profile.
2. Run the importer on that file:

akb ingest netflix ViewingActivity.csv

Each row becomes a Watched note:

• The note title is the show or film name.
• A show field links every row to a shared entry for the show or film itself. Every episode of a show, and every re-watch of a film, points to the same entry, so opening or searching it gathers everything you have watched of that title. (The field is named show and covers films too.) The entry has no Wikidata or IMDb id yet - a later step can look those up and add them.
• Season and episode are filled in when the title is clearly an episode (works in any language, e.g. Stagione 1), and left empty otherwise so you can complete them.
• A service field links every row to a shared Netflix entry.
• A rating field is left blank for you to fill in.

Because the Watched table is an Event table, every row shows up on the timeline on its watch day. Select any timeline card to open its note. On mobile, Alexandria returns you directly to the editor.

Good to know

• Safe to re-run. Importing the same file again, or a newer export that overlaps, updates existing notes in place. It never creates duplicates.
• Kept tidy. Imported rows are filed under their table (for example, every Watched row sits under the Watched table) rather than loose at the top level. Re-running an import also tidies up rows from earlier imports.
• Your edits are kept. If you change a field by hand and then re-import, your value is kept and the change is reported instead of being overwritten. Pass --force if you want the imported value to win.
• Preview first. Add --dry-run to see what a file would do without writing anything.
• Dates. Netflix uses month-day-year (5/3/26), which is the default. If your export happens to use day-month-year, add --date-format dmy. ISO dates like 2026-05-03 always work.
• Multiple profiles. Netflix scopes each export to one profile and does not name it, so you normally do not need anything extra. If you import more than one profile into the same vault, pass --profile NAME to keep their rows distinct.

See what is available

akb ingest list

This lists the importers you can run and the options each one takes.

Add real show and film ids

Freshly imported show and film entries are grouped by title but have no Wikidata or IMDb id yet. To look those up and attach them:

akb enrich --source netflix:

For each show or film, Alexandria searches Wikidata (films and TV only). When there is one clear match it links it and stores its Wikidata and IMDb ids on the same entry, so you can search that show or film and find everything about it. When a title is ambiguous (say a series and a film share a name), it lists the options so you can pick the right one. Add --dry-run to preview first. Running it again only touches entries that are still unlinked.

In the app you do the same thing from the timeline's Enrich button: it scans your unresolved shows and films, lets you pick a match for each ambiguous title, and links every confident match at once with Auto-link all confident.