QuickMem
Import your Anki decks into QuickMem
QuickMem opens an .apkg export directly — decks, notes, note types, cloze cards and images. Here is how to move a collection across, and what to expect while it lands.
If your cards already exist, you should not have to type them again. QuickMem reads Anki's own .apkg export file, so a collection you have spent months building comes across as decks of flashcards you can study the same evening.
Export the deck from Anki
In Anki on the desktop, right-click the deck and choose Export, or use File → Export. Pick the Anki Deck Package (.apkg) format, and leave Include media switched on if your cards have pictures on them. You will get a single file named after the deck.
On AnkiDroid the equivalent lives in the deck's menu. Either way, get the file onto the phone you study on — email it to yourself, drop it in your cloud storage, or transfer it over a cable.
Open it in QuickMem
In QuickMem, choose the Anki import option and pick the .apkg file. The app reads it on the device: it unpacks the archive, opens the collection inside it, and works out what each card should say.
That last part is the fiddly bit, and it is the reason a general "flashcard importer" usually disappoints. An Anki note is not a card — it is a row of fields, and the note type decides how those fields become one or more cards through its templates. QuickMem reads the note types and renders the templates, so a Basic note gives you one card, a note type with a reverse template gives you both directions, and a cloze note gives you one card per deletion, exactly as it did in Anki.
Both collection formats in circulation are handled — the older one that keeps note types as JSON inside the collection, and the current one that keeps them in their own tables — so it does not matter whether the export came from a recent Anki or one that has been sitting in a folder for years.
Your deck tree survives
Anki writes nesting into the deck name: Spanish::Verbs::Irregular. QuickMem has real nested decks, so the import rebuilds the tree rather than leaving you with a flat list of decks called "Spanish::Verbs". Spanish::Verbs and Spanish::Nouns end up sharing one Spanish parent, and that parent exists even if Anki never gave it a card of its own — it just shows the total for everything beneath it.
What happens to the pictures
Images are the slowest part of any import, so QuickMem does not make you wait for them. The cards are saved as soon as their text is ready, and the pictures upload behind them; a card with a picture shows up straight away and gains its image shortly after. On a large deck this is the difference between studying in a few seconds and staring at a progress bar for a quarter of an hour.
Keep the app open while the images finish, and keep the .apkg file on the phone until they do — the upload reads the pictures back out of the archive.
What comes across, and what does not
- Comes across: the deck tree, the notes in it, note types and their templates, cloze deletions, and the images on cards.
- Does not come across: your Anki review history and scheduling state, add-ons, custom card styling and CSS, audio, and video. Cards arrive as new cards, so QuickMem starts scheduling them from the first time you grade one.
- Skipped, and counted for you: any card that renders with an empty front or back — which is how the welcome and title notes that shared decks ship do not become cards you have to bury. The import summary tells you how many were left out.
- Not built yet: export back out as an
.apkg. If you want to keep one foot in Anki, keep the collection there as well for now.
Then let it schedule them
An imported deck of a thousand cards is not a thousand cards to study tonight. QuickMem's daily queue takes everything that is due plus up to twenty cards you have never seen, across your whole library, so a big import ramps in over the following weeks instead of arriving all at once. There is more on that in how spaced repetition decides what you study today.
If the cards you want do not exist in any app yet, the Helper will write them — from a description, or from a PDF of your notes.