How to import your Pocket export into Notion (and keep your tags)

Updated October 7, 2026

Short answer: convert the Pocket export into a Notion-friendly CSV first, then use Notion's built-in CSV import. Drop your Pocket file (the .csv, or ril_export.html from older exports) into a free in-browser converter, download the CSV, and in Notion go to Settings → Import → CSV. Every saved link becomes a database page with Title, URL, Tags, Saved date and Status. Then switch the Tags property to Multi-select and your Pocket tags come back as real tags.

That's the whole thing. The rest of this post is why the conversion step matters, the exact Notion clicks, and what you can't get back.

Why not just drop the Pocket CSV into Notion?

You can. Notion will import it. It just won't be very useful.

Pocket's CSV export has five columns: title, url, time_added, tags, status. Two of them fight Notion:

• time_added is a Unix timestamp. You get a number column full of values like 1700000000 instead of a date you can sort or filter by.
• tags uses a vertical bar as the separator. An item tagged reading|ai|longform lands in Notion as one tag called reading|ai|longform. Notion's Multi-select splits on commas, not bars.

And if you have the older HTML export (ril_export.html), Notion imports it as one page full of links, not a database. The "Unread" and "Read Archive" headings that told you what you'd finished are just headings.

So the fix is a small rewrite before you import:

In the Pocket export	In the Notion CSV
title	Title
url	URL
tags (`reading\	ai`)
time_added (1700000000)	Saved date (November 14, 2023 10:13 PM)
status (unread / archive)	Status (Unread / Archived)

The date format isn't random. It's the same format Notion writes in its own CSV exports, so Notion recognises it when you set the property type to Date.

Step 1: find your export file

Pocket sent the export as a .zip. Unzip it. Inside is a CSV, usually named something like part_000000.csv. If you exported years ago, you might have ril_export.html instead. Both work.

If you never exported: Mozilla shut Pocket down on July 8, 2025 and the export window closed on October 8, 2025, after which the data was deleted (Mozilla's announcement). There's no way to get it now. Before giving up, search your Downloads folder and your email for the export link: if you requested it before the deadline, the file you got still works.

Step 2: convert it

I wrote a small, free converter for this:

• Online: fullclip.roledawn.com/tools/pocket-to-notion
• Source (MIT, a single HTML page you can open offline): github.com/binbuilds0/pocket-to-notion

Drop the file on the page and click Download Notion CSV. It runs entirely in your browser. The page's Content-Security-Policy has connect-src 'none', which means the browser itself blocks any network request from it, so your reading history can't be uploaded even by accident. If you'd rather not trust a hosted page at all, clone the repo and open index.html from disk.

A few things it takes care of:

• Duplicates. If you saved the same URL twice, it keeps the first one and tells you how many it skipped.
• Big libraries. Notion accepts CSV files up to 5 MB on the Free plan and 50 MB on paid plans (Notion's import docs). If your CSV would go past about 4.5 MB, the converter splits it into numbered parts.
• Commas inside tags. Since Notion splits Multi-select on commas, a tag like books, fiction would become two tags. Those commas get replaced with spaces.
• Instapaper. Same tool, same output. Instapaper folders other than Unread and Archive are kept as tags, so you don't lose that grouping.

You also get a Markdown checklist of every link grouped by Unread and Archived, if you'd rather keep the list in Obsidian or a plain notes file.

Step 3: import into Notion

1. In Notion, open Settings → Import → CSV. Or type /csv on any page.
2. Pick the CSV. Notion creates a new database: one page per row, one property per column.
3. Fix the property types. Click the Tags column header, change the type to Multi-select. The comma-separated values become separate tags. Set Saved date to Date and Status to Select if Notion didn't guess them.
4. If you got several parts, import part 1 first. Then open the new database, click ••• in the top right, choose Merge with CSV, and add the other parts one at a time.

One warning from Notion's own docs: imports add rows, they don't update existing ones. If you merge the same file twice you get every link twice. Merge each part once.

Step 4: make it useful

A database of 2,000 links is only better than a CSV if you can find things. A few setups that help:

• A board view grouped by Status, so Unread is a column you can actually work through.
• A filter on Tags for each topic you care about, saved as separate views.
• Sort by Saved date, oldest first on the Unread view. Old saves are usually either still great or obviously dead, and both are fast to decide on.

What you can't get back

Be clear-eyed about this part. A CSV holds links and properties. Notion's import can't fetch the articles, so you get a list, not your reading library. The export itself is a list of links, not saved article text.

Highlights aren't in the converted file. And if a site has since gone offline or moved behind a paywall, the link is all you have.

For the handful of articles you actually want to keep, the reliable fix is to open each one and save the full page into Notion with a web clipper. That's what I'm building Fullclip for: it's a Chrome web clipper for Notion that saves the whole article (text, images, tables and code blocks) into the same kind of database. You don't need it for the import above; the converter works on its own.

Quick reference

• Pocket export files: .csv (newer) or ril_export.html (older)
• Notion import: Settings → Import → CSV, or /csv
• Add to an existing database: ••• → Merge with CSV
• Notion file limit: 5 MB per file (Free), 50 MB (paid)
• Tags property type: Multi-select
• Article text included: no

If your export doesn't convert the way you expect, open an issue on the GitHub repo with a trimmed sample (strip anything private) and I'll take a look.