Moving in from Pocket, Instapaper, or Omnivore
Read-it-later apps have had a rough few years. Omnivore was acquired and shut down. Pocket — the app that basically invented the category — was sunsetted by Mozilla. If you used either, you probably have an export file sitting in your Downloads folder that you meant to do something with.
This is the something. Squirrel Reader imports Pocket, Instapaper, and Omnivore exports directly, and this post covers exactly what comes over, what doesn’t, and the one honest limitation you should know about before you start.
First, get your export file
Pocket. Pocket’s export lived at getpocket.com/export, which gave you an HTML file — usually named ril_export.html — containing every link you saved, with tags, save dates, and the unread/archive split baked in. If the export page still works when you read this, grab your file now rather than later. If you already downloaded one during the shutdown, that file is exactly what you need. Don’t open it and try to copy things out; the raw file is the import.
Instapaper. Instapaper is still alive and well. Log in at instapaper.com, go to Settings, and look for the Export section — “Download .CSV file.” You’ll get a CSV with your URLs, titles, folders, and timestamps.
Omnivore. Omnivore’s export was a zip archive. Unzip it and look for the JSON metadata files inside — those are what the importer reads. If your export has several metadata files, that’s fine; you can import them one at a time, and (as you’ll see below) running the importer repeatedly is harmless.
Then, the import itself
In Squirrel Reader: Settings → Import, then pick your file. The app sniffs the filename and the first few kilobytes to detect the format, so a ril_export.html is recognized as Pocket and a CSV as Instapaper without you doing anything. If detection guesses wrong — say your export got renamed somewhere along the way — there are format chips to override it manually.
From there, everything is queued and parsed server-side. The items land in your library right away with their titles and URLs, and then our server visits each URL to build the clean reader view: readable text, images, word count, reading time, thumbnail. Large imports go up in batches of a couple hundred items, so a multi-thousand-item library takes a little while to fully fill in. That’s normal. Go make tea; the queue works through it.
What comes over
- URLs and titles, obviously.
- Your original save dates. All three formats carry a timestamp, and we keep it — your library stays in the order you actually built it, not sorted by “imported last Tuesday.”
- Tags. Pocket tags and Omnivore labels come over as tags. Instapaper doesn’t have tags, but its folders map sensibly: anything you filed into a custom folder arrives tagged with that folder’s name.
- Archived state. Pocket’s archive section, Instapaper’s Archive folder, and Omnivore’s archived items all land in your Archive here, not dumped into your inbox. Your carefully maintained zero-inbox stays zero.
Re-imports are safe
Duplicates are skipped by URL. If an import gets interrupted, or you’re not sure whether you already ran a file, just run it again — anything already in your library is counted as “skipped” and left alone, including items you saved through the share sheet or Chrome extension in the meantime. The results screen tells you how many items were imported and how many were skipped, so you can sanity-check the totals against what you expected.
This also means the multi-file Omnivore case is painless: import each metadata file in whatever order, twice if you lose track.
What doesn’t come over (yet)
Two things, and I’d rather tell you up front than have you find out mid-import.
The free tier caps at 500 saved items. If your Pocket library is 3,000 items deep — and whose isn’t — the import will stop when it hits the cap and tell you so, rather than silently dropping things. Finishing the job needs Premium ($4.99/month or $39.99/year), which removes the item cap along with the other limits. I know “pay to finish your migration” isn’t anyone’s favorite sentence, so to be clear: nothing is lost or held hostage. Your export file doesn’t expire, and re-running it later picks up right where the cap stopped it.
Highlights aren’t imported. Instapaper’s CSV includes your highlighted passages and Omnivore’s export includes highlights too, but right now we only bring over the items themselves. Highlight import is on the list; I’m not going to promise a date. If your highlights matter to you, keep the export file — it’s the same file, so there’s nothing extra to do.
Reading progress and per-article notes from other services don’t transfer either, for the unglamorous reason that the export formats mostly don’t include them.
On not doing this again
The uncomfortable subtext of this post is that you’re migrating because apps you trusted went away. It seems only fair to say what happens if you ever want to leave us: Settings has a JSON export of your items, tags, collections, and highlights, available to everyone, no tier required. Your library also lives in a SQLite database on your own device, so the copy in your hand is always yours. A squirrel who spent years burying acorns shouldn’t need permission to dig them back up.
If an import does something weird — a file that won’t detect, tags that came over mangled — email support@squirrelreader.com with the format you’re importing from and I’ll take a look.