Reset new card Index "Due Date"

The problem is as follows:
When creating a new card it gets an index in the form of #New1xxx for it`s Due date. For me, this index has reached 7 figures. This poses a problem because I would like the manually created cards in my deck to appear before the preexisting imported cards.
One fix would be if the index was always lower for the added cards, but it’s not and I don’t know how to lower it.
Help would be greatly appreciated, I hope I could describe the problem sufficiently.

You can fix this with Reposition in the Browse window. Browsing - Anki Manual

  1. Get all of your New cards in view – search is:new. [For this to be effective, you need to do this on your whole collection, even if you don’t study all of the cards together.]
  2. Sort them by the “Due” column – so they will be in New-queue # order.
  3. Select All > Cards > Reposition.
  4. Make a note of where the “queue bottom” currently is (out in the 7 figures).
  5. Choose start 0 [or see below], step 1, boxes both unchecked. OK.
  6. Tools > Check Database.

When that finishes, you can open the Reposition box again, to see where your new “queue bottom” is.

The New-queue numbers only matter relative to each other, so it doesn’t matter if they are consecutive. And if there are blocks of cards that you want to be introduced before/after other blocks, you can Reposition those relative to each other too.

There’s no option to do that, but there is a way to approach it. At step 5 above, set your “start” to something higher than 0 (100? 500?). This will create “room” at the front of the queue, and make your newly added cards more likely to be created there.

Sometimes though they will still be created at the end of the queue. At the end of the day when you’ve been adding cards, you can search up those New cards with added:1 and check their New-queue numbers. If any of them went to the end of the queue, you can Reposition them to something closer to the front.

Thanks for the reply.
I did this. Now before adding a new card the note bottom is 16 000. (I set the reposition start at 10 000 to “make room”). But still, when I add a new card it gets the queue number 1429443+ (7 figures). I get that I can manually reposition the new cards to go <10 000, but I would like that to happen automatically (so the new cards to just start at zero and go to 10 000.
Thanks for the engagement!

Did you do the Check Database step too? That’s what resets the index for your queue. If that didn’t “take” – try Check Database one more time, maybe after a restart?

Either that or there’s a card somewhere else in your collection that is still holding on to an old New number …

ok so restarting actually halve solved the issue, now added cards index from 16 002. do you have an idea how I can make the new added cards start counting from zero?

thanks for the tremendous help!

Right! I can’t believe I forgot that part, because it’s one of my favorite features! In Deck Options, change your New card insertion order to “Random.” Yes, there will be a warning box, but I’ve personally ignored that warning for years and it hasn’t hurt me yet!

See: In defense of Insertion order: Random and Drop the insertion order option · Issue #3583 · ankitects/anki · GitHub .

ok, so finally I found a satisfying solution. It is just changing the New Card gather order to to “Deck”. This means that I can add cards to a different subdeck than the preexisting imported deck and prioritize it by giving it a numeric prefix (001,…).
Thanks for the quick replies!

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That works too! I’ve used that in the past with deck-specific daily limits to adjust the flow of cards from each of the decks, so I didn’t get a flood of completely new-and-novel words at once.