I am teacher and have started to provide my students with flashcards by sharing .apkg files, which I created customized for my lessons.
Now I have slightly modified some of my notes (notetype not changed) and want to share the modifications with the students without their individual learning progress being overwritten. So I created a package without scheduling information.
In the Anki manual it reads: “When you import an .apkg file, Anki will identify any notes in it that are already in your collection due to a previous import. If the notes in the file are newer than your local copy, the notes will be updated with the contents of the file by default.” - This is exactly what I want to happen with the students’ collections.
However, when I import the .apkg file with the modified notes, there is no updating. Instead, all notes in the file are added as new ones - so that I end up with a duplicated collection. This happens both with the desktop version of Anki and with Anki Mobile.
I would be grateful for any hints how I can fix the problem!
Anki was not able to identify the modified notes with the existing ones, because I had not made the modifications within Anki. Instead, I had modified the .csv-file from which my collection had originally been created. Importing that file resulted in a completely new collection.
I had thought that an unmodified “ID” field within my import file would assure that the modified notes could be identified with the existing ones. This is obviously not the case. Apparently Anki assigns an (invisible) intern ID which is responsible for the job.
Maybe is import had an option to take a specific column (like the first) as the index and Anki import harmonizes this with the internal id, this way someone could edit content outside the Anki editor itself…
I have now tried to overwrite a collection with a modified csv-file (instead of first deleting the existing collection and then doing the import). So I get an updated collection and can still use a text editor for editing, which is convenient in many cases.
I am on my way to understand Anki better and better…