How To Merge Anki Decks

• Introduction
• 1. Select Cards to Merge
• 2. Add Tags to Cards
• 3. Merge Anki Decks
• 4. Cleanup
• Conclusion

If you use Anki for any length of time, there are many occasions where you could find cards split up across multiple decks even though they should probably be in the same deck.

• There might be multiple decks that are separate parts of a larger collective deck.
• You may want to combine multiple types of decks into one broad category.
• Or maybe you don’t like subdecks, and want to make one big normal deck.

This article focuses on how to merge Anki decks, to reduce the total number of decks, and be more organized.

Introduction

Due to file-size limits, shared decks uploaded to the Anki website often have to be split if they’re too large.

For this article, I have a three-part shared Anki deck of French Sentences, that I want to combine into one.

We’re going to move all the cards from our source decks (Part 2 and Part 3) into our destination deck (Part 1).

1. Select Cards to Merge

Click the browse button at the top of the main window in order to enter the Anki card browser.

From here, click the source deck, and select all the cards.

2. Add Tags to Cards

This step is optional, but highly recommended. Once you merge decks, you may decide in the future, for whatever reason, to separate them again. But you’ll need some way to determine which cards were in which deck.

To do so, navigate to Notes > Add Tags menu location.

Then add a tag describing the original deck. Here are some tips for adding tags:

• Don’t use superfluous tags. For instance, you don’t need to have Japanese, jp, and nihongo tags.

• Using spaces will treat words as separate tags. Instead use, an underscore ‘_’ or hyphen ‘-‘, to separate words in a tag.

  Examples: needs_image, casual-slang, test-2_vocab

• Don’t use commas to separate multiple different tags. The comma itself will become part of the tag. Only spaces.

3. Merge Anki Decks

1. With the cards still selected, from the top menu, select Cards then Change Decks

   

2. When the box appears, select the destination deck, and click Move Cards.

4. Cleanup

We’ve moved all the cards to the proper deck, but now we have an empty source deck. So delete it.

This can be done by right clicking the deck in the card browser, or by selecting the gear icon, next to the deck on the main menu.

Optionally, rename the final deck. This option can also be found in te card browser or main menu.

Since only part one exists now, we can delete (1/3) from the name.

If you have more than 2 decks to merge, repeat the processes starting from step 2.

Conclusion

And that’s it! We’ve combined multiple anki decks, and merged them into one deck. We also cleaned everything up, and stayed organized. Now we’re ready to study.

For other great Anki tips, see our article about anki deck organization.