The CSV file Pocket left you: what to do with it

What Pocket left you, exactly

Start with the dates, because they explain the state of your file. Mozilla announced the shutdown on May 22, 2025, on its own blog. Pocket stopped working on July 8, 2025, the day annual subscriptions were refunded.

The next date is the hard one. Since November 12, 2025, the export and the programming interface are closed, and data deletion has begun. If you did not download your file before that day, there is no official way to get one now.

What the file holds, according to Mozilla's own help page: a CSV listing the addresses of everything you had saved, archived and favorited. The text of the articles is not in it, in plain words. So you have links, not a library.

Cannot find the file? Search your downloads for “pocket”, then search your inbox: the download link arrived by email. People report that the title and tag columns are uneven from one account to the next, and we found no official page describing the columns one by one. Look at yours before drawing conclusions.

Open the file and see what is in it

A CSV is a plain text file. You need nothing paid to open it.

1. 1Fastest route: right-click the file, Open with, then TextEdit on a Mac or Notepad on Windows. The first row gives you the column names.
2. 2To read it as a table, import it into any free spreadsheet, choosing the comma as separator and UTF-8 as encoding. Otherwise accented characters come out as gibberish.
3. 3Count your rows before you start. The number of rows minus one is how many links you are about to take back in hand.

Look closely at the tag column, if you have one. It is the only organizing work you ever did inside Pocket, and the only thing worth carrying over as it is.

Turn the addresses back into cards

A bare link cannot be searched. You do not remember an address, you remember a picture and three words. So every row needs its image and its title back.

1. 1Open the import page in Trouvé and drop the file as it is, with no renaming and no cleaning up.
2. 2We read the address column, the title column if there is one, and open each page to bring back its image and a short title.
3. 3The first tag on a row becomes a collection with that name, and a folder is proposed for each card from its title and address. Your Pocket organizing does not start from zero.
4. 4The grid fills in front of you, card by card. The first 50 finds are free, and the rest wait next to them, visible.

To go past 50, Trouvé for life costs €29, one payment, with no subscription and no limit on finds. It is the only thing we sell.

The image and the title are kept on our side, not just the address. For a file several years old, that is the difference that matters: the card still exists on the day the original page does not.

Some of your links will not answer

Better to know before you start. A list built between 2015 and 2025 has melted along the way.

The Pew Research Center, in “When Online Content Disappears” published on May 17, 2024, measured that 38% of the pages that existed in 2013 were no longer reachable ten years later. Over a single year, 8% of the pages from 2023 had already gone.

1. 1Count first: our checking page knocks on every link in your file and shows you which ones are lost, with no account, and without keeping the file.
2. 2For a lost link you care about, search its exact title in a search engine. An article republished elsewhere often turns up in a minute.
3. 3Keep the card even when the page is gone. The title, the image and your note are worth more than a deleted row, and they are what will let you find the same thing again elsewhere.

That is the one useful lesson from the end of Pocket. A service can stop, but it is the links themselves that go quiet, every day, and always have.