imdb-backup-lists

A simple tool to backup all your lists from IMDb including your watchlist and ratings. Creates a .zip archive with .csv files exported from the site. To prevent filesystem errors all personal lists are renamed to ls0XXXXXXXX_latinized-list-name.csv, but all original list titles (including multiline ones) are preserved in titles.txt in the same archive.

Installation:

The easiest way to run this tool on Windows is to download a portable executable from the Releases tab. The executable is created with PyInstaller but is not an installer.

Otherwise you can run it from the source code:

1. Make sure you have Python 3.12+ installed:

   $ python --version
   Python 3.12

2. Install requests, beautifulsoup4 and unidecode libraries:

   $ pip3 install requests beautifulsoup4 unidecode

3. Download imdb_backup.py from the repo.

How to run:

1. Copy your IMDb at-main, ubid-main and uu cookies from your browser:

   1. Open any page on IMDb.
   2. Open Developer tools in your browser:
      • Firefox: ≡ → Web Developer → Storage Inspector
        
        
      • Chrome: ⫶ → More tools → Developer tools → Application tab
        
        
   3. Expand "Cookies" in the left panel and select http://www.imdb.com.
   4. Find rows named at-main, ubid-main and uu, double click on their cells in the "Value" column and copy them.

2. Create a new file imdb_cookie.json in the script directory and paste the following data into it, replacing ellipses with your cookies from the previous step:

   {
     "at-main": "...",
     "ubid-main": "...",
     "uu": "..."
   }

3. Use any of the following steps to run the tool (depending on which file you've downloaded):

   • Executable (imdb_backup.exe):
     • double click on the file
     • or type imdb_backup.exe --nopause in the command line
   • Script (imdb_backup.py):
     • double click on the file
     • or type python imdb_backup.py --nopause in the command line

4. After the tool has finished running, imdb_exported_lists.zip should appear in your working directory.

Building

$ pyinstaller --onefile imdb_backup.py