Importing similar cards

Hi everyone,

My name is Ali, I’m a medical student. I’m looking for a way to force Anki to import every single card from an .apkg file, even if duplicates already exist in my collection.

The situation:

· I have the AnKing deck in my collection (about 28000 cards).
· I have a separate .apkg file that contains some of the same cards, plus additional content.
· When I import it, Anki skips most of the cards in the new deck because they already exist in that previous deck
· I want to keep BOTH copies – I don’t mind having duplicates. I just want to make sure to NOT miss any context from these cards

What I’ve tried:

· Renaming the note type (didn’t work – still skipped)
· Changing .apkg import settings (Merge types, update notes, update note types)

My question:

Is there a built-in setting or add-on that forces Anki to import all cards regardless of duplicates? A setting that treats decks independently?

I’m using AnkiDroid, but I have access to the desktop version too if needed.

Thanks in advance for any help!

We read:

“When importing text files, Anki uses the first field to determine if a note is unique. By default, if the file you are importing has a first field that matches one of the existing notes in your collection and that existing note is the same type as the type you’re importing, the existing note’s other fields will be updated based on content of the imported file. A drop-down box in the import screen allows you to change this behaviour, to either ignore duplicates completely, or import them as new notes instead of updating existing ones.”

“If some notes in the deck package have previously been imported, Anki will keep the version with the most recent modification time.”

If you really need to simply duplicate everything, you should:

  • create a new profile, say named “test”
  • import the “.apkg” deck into this profile
  • export this deck as a text file
  • review this text file to make sure everything is configured correctly
  • switch to a different, working profile
  • import this text file with the duplicate creation settings.
    To avoid any mess-ups, practice on a small test deck, literally 3 notes. When you’ve finished all these steps, you’ve created a deck with 6 notes, and you can try it on your working deck.