Importing & bulk actions

Why importing bookmarks and running bulk actions process in the background — and can take a while — as Notebooker snapshots pages, builds wiki articles, and more.

Adding one link to Notebooker is quick. Importing hundreds of them — or running a bulk action across a big selection — is a different story: Notebooker does real work on each source (extracting text, rendering PDF snapshots, writing wiki articles), and that work runs in the background over time rather than all at once.

This guide explains what’s happening, why it can be slow, and how to watch it progress.

What happens when you import

The Import button on your Library lets you upload a bookmarks export — Raindrop or browser HTML, or a Raindrop CSV, up to 50 MB. Tags become notebooks; untagged links are saved on their own. (Bulk import is a premium feature; you can always add single links for free.)

When you submit, you’ll see “Import started — we’re adding your bookmarks in the background.” Notebooker then:

  1. Turns each distinct tag into a notebook (reusing notebooks of the same name).
  2. Splits your bookmarks into small batches and queues them.
  3. Creates each source the same way a hand-saved link is created — and kicks off whatever per-source processing you have enabled (see below).

Your sources appear in the Library progressively as the batches finish, and you get a single “Bookmark import finished” notification at the end.

Heads up on AI credit. Each imported link uses AI credit. If your credit runs out partway through, the remaining links may fail to process — you can re-import them later. For a large import, consider raising your monthly spending cap first so processing isn’t cut off.

Bulk actions

Select one or more sources in your Library (or use Select all) and a bulk action bar appears. You can:

  • Add to Wiki — queue each selected source to be categorized and folded into your wiki.
  • Generate PDF snapshot — queue a PDF render of each selected page.
  • Delete — remove the selected sources.

Like importing, these queue work in the background — you’ll get a toast such as “Snapshotting N source(s) — we’ll render and store PDFs shortly” and the items finish over time.

The work that runs per source

Each source can trigger several background tasks. Two of them are substantial:

Task What it does Why it takes time
PDF snapshot Captures the live webpage as a stored PDF you can open anytime. It opens a real browser and renders the actual page. Snapshots run only a couple at a time, so they drain slowly — especially after a big import.
Wiki article Categorizes the source into 1–3 wiki topics, then rewrites each affected topic into a cited, interlinked article. It’s AI generation — both the categorization and the article rewrite — with limited capacity.

(Plus the usual behind-the-scenes text extraction and indexing for search.)

So if you import 100 bookmarks with both PDF snapshots and wiki turned on, that’s not 100 quick saves — it’s hundreds of queued tasks: a browser render and an AI-written article for every link. That fans out across Notebooker’s processing queues and completes over minutes to hours, not seconds.

This is deliberate. Imports and bulk actions run on low-priority lanes, so a big batch never slows down a link you save by hand — those stay fast.

Watching progress

There’s no single progress bar, but each source row tells you where it is:

  • “Processing…” — the source is still being set up.
  • A pulsing document icon — PDF snapshot in progress. When it’s done, the icon becomes View PDF snapshot.
  • A pulsing book icon — Adding to wiki…. When it’s done, it becomes In your wiki.

You don’t have to keep the page open — processing continues on Notebooker’s servers. Check back and you’ll see more rows finished each time.

Make new sources process automatically (or not)

Under Settings → Sources you control what happens to newly added sources:

  • Auto-snapshot new link sources — every new URL you add is queued for a PDF snapshot.
  • Auto-add new sources to wiki — every new source is folded into your wiki as cited, interlinked articles.

Both are premium, and both affect only new sources — turning them on doesn’t retro-process your existing library.

If you want a large import to finish faster, turn these off before importing so the links come in without the extra snapshot and wiki work — then snapshot or add-to-wiki later, in batches, using the bulk actions whenever you’re ready.

Tips for large imports

  • Raise your spending cap first so a long import isn’t cut off when credit runs low.
  • Decide on snapshots and wiki up front. Off = fast import of just the links; on = richer results that take longer.
  • Let it run. Close the tab if you like — work continues in the background, and the row status icons show progress when you return.

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