How do I import my journal from another site?

To import your journal, go to the Import Journal page while logged in as the Dreamwidth account you want to import to. You'll have to enter the service you want to import from and your username and password for that site and then push the "continue" button. At the moment you can import your personal journal to Dreamwidth Studios from LiveJournal or InsaneJournal, and we're hoping to add more sites in the future.

We won't use your password for anything other than the import, but if you aren't comfortable sharing your password with us, you might consider changing your password on the other site before you import and then changing it back after the import has finished.

On the next page of the importer you'll have the option to choose which elements of your journal to import. The choices are:

• Profile Data
• Journal Entries
• Journal Comments
• Tags
• Icons
• Custom Groups

Make your selections and push the "continue" button. The next page will summarize your choices so you can review them. You can then start the import by pushing the "Start Import" button.

Entries that were posted to a custom filter in your other journal will create an identical custom access filter when they're imported to your Dreamwidth journal. The access filters will contain the OpenID accounts of the people in that filter on the other service. You'll need to manually add their Dreamwidth accounts, if they have them, to put those accounts into the filter.

If you've set a default security level for your Dreamwidth journal, the entries you import will be posted using that security level unless you specified a higher one in the journal you're importing. For example, if your Dreamwidth journal is set to "access-only", any public entries you import will also become access-only.

Importing your journal can take anywhere from minutes to days. Your import request is entered into a queue, and the speed of your import will depend on how many other people are importing at the same time.

When your import is finished, we'll send a notification to your Dreamwidth Inbox.

If you do multiple imports of your journal, or if you've previously crossposted entries from your Dreamwidth journal to the journal you're now importing, you shouldn't get duplicate copies of entries. Crossposted and duplicate entries should be detected and won't be imported.

Under certain, very specific instances, you may get duplicate entries. If this happens, please contact Support. Please provide the URLs of 3-5 entries and their duplicates so that Support can work to identify the problem.

You can also import the contents of more than one journal into the same Dreamwidth journal. You'll need to run the importer once for each journal, but you can't run two imports at the same time: you'll need to wait until the first one has finished before starting another.

We currently only have the ability to import your friends list to your access list, not to your reading page. You can manually add feeds for your friends journals if you wish to, but we don't have an automated system for it. We'd like to be able to offer one in the future, but right now we don't have a timetable for when it might be available.

Please also note, when you import from another LiveJournal-based site, your entries may import with tags that you have since deleted or removed from the entry. This is a bug on the remote site, and something we can't fix.