When I first downloaded Anki, I felt the reviews were coming up too frequently even though I had already learned it. So, I changed the Study Options, and increased the Learning steps, Graduating interval, and Easy interval by a lot, so the reviews wouldn’t show up as frequently.
I kept it this way for MONTHS, before I realized it was offsetting my reviews by a lot. Some cards I barely knew weren’t going to show up until 3 years later. Obviously this wasn’t great. So, I updated the Study Options again, but all the old cars with 3+ year intervals didn’t change.
So, here’s my question: is there a way to update all of my old cards to adjust their intervals to what it WOULD have been if I had lower Learning Steps? Or any way to mass decrease the intervals without completely resetting the card or using random intervals? (because this isn’t what I want)
You could decrease your Maximum interval in Deck Options > Advanced
The maximum number of days a review card will wait. When reviews have reached the limit, Hard, Good and Easy will all give the same delay. The shorter you set this, the greater your workload will be.
If you use FSRS (23.10+) you might want to consider FSRS4Anki Helper:
Reschedule → How does it work: Calculates the stability, difficulty, and the optimum interval from the entire review logs for each card with the weights stored in your FSRS4Anki Scheduler code. Then, it replaces the current due dates with the calculated ones.
Load Balance → How does it work: After the optimal interval is calculated, it is adjusted by a random amount to make the distribution of reviews over time more uniform.
Changing the max interval is good, but semi-permanent – you might want them to have longer intervals eventually, and the max will prevent that.
An FSRS Reschedule will work, but only if FSRS agrees with you that those cards should have shorter intervals. That’s not a bad bargain to make, because FSRS is very smart about choosing new intervals – probably smarter than any of us are with our own cards.
But, if aren’t using FSRS (and don’t want to start), and you just want to bang your Review cards into new aribtrarily shorter intervals and have them due somewhat arbitrarily sooner, you can use “Set Due Date” for that – Browsing - Anki Manual. I use this on a smaller scale when I have made major changes to a note/card, and I want to see it much sooner, but I don’t want to reset it to New.
I’d suggest gathering a set of cards by a “chunk” of due dates (Searching - Anki Manual), and setting those for a new “chunk” of intervals (using a range and the ! part of Set Due Date). This will allow you to do it proportionately to a certain extent, if you want to. Then when you’ve given them new “reasonable” intervals, you can gather all of the cards, and set them for a new range of due dates, so they get studied under your repaired set of Deck Options.