Pocket shutdown: migrate your video bookmarks (2026)
guides

Pocket shutdown: migrate your video bookmarks (2026)

Pocket shut down in 2025. If your library was mostly YouTube and Reels, here's how to migrate video bookmarks to a tool that actually searches inside them — step by step.

SavedThat team9 min read

Mozilla discontinued Pocket in mid-2025, ending eighteen years of read-it-later. If your saved library was mostly articles, the migration is a Raindrop or Instapaper import and you're done. If it was mostly videos — YouTube interviews, Instagram Reels, TikTok demos, podcast clips — none of the obvious replacements actually fit. They were built for articles too.

This guide walks through the migration most former-Pocket-users with a video-heavy library should actually do: export from Pocket, split videos out, drop articles into a classical bookmark manager, and put videos into a transcript-search tool that can find what was said in them. Step by step, with the tools and the gotchas.

Why the Pocket shutdown matters more for video libraries

Pocket worked as a read-it-later because the content was text — articles, blog posts, the occasional PDF. The Pocket app was good at fetching, reformatting, and full-text-indexing that text. Search by keyword was the whole point.

For videos saved in Pocket, the search story was always weaker. The app stored the URL, a title, and a thumbnail. The transcript of what was actually said in the video was invisible. So when you saved a 45-minute YouTube interview because of one quote at minute 23, Pocket had nothing to help you find that quote again. The shutdown just makes the limitation impossible to ignore.

Most "Pocket alternatives" inherited the article-first architecture: Readwise Reader, Instapaper, Matter (the old one). They all do article reading beautifully and ignore videos. If your library was 80% videos, picking one of them re-creates the same blind spot you had in Pocket.

The right move is a two-tool migration: articles to Raindrop or Instapaper, videos to a transcript-search tool. We'll walk through both.

Step 1 — Export your Pocket library

Mozilla's grace period for downloading your Pocket export ran into early 2026. If you missed it, your data may be gone. Check inbox for the "Your Pocket export is ready" email Mozilla sent on shutdown announcement, or visit the Pocket help pages still archived at support.mozilla.org.

The export is a CSV with one row per saved item. Columns typically include title, url, time_added, tags, and status (unread/archive/favourite). It's UTF-8, comma-separated, with one quirk: tags are space-separated inside a single column. Save the file as pocket-export.csv.

If you already had Pocket on auto-export to Instapaper or Readwise, you might also have a backup there. Worth checking before you decide your data is lost.

Step 2 — Split videos out from articles

You want to route YouTube/Instagram/TikTok URLs to one tool and everything else to another. Five-line shell snippet does this on any Mac or Linux machine:

# Extract video URLs
grep -iE 'youtube\.com|youtu\.be|instagram\.com/reel|tiktok\.com' \
  pocket-export.csv > videos.csv

# Everything else (articles, PDFs, Twitter threads, etc.)
grep -ivE 'youtube\.com|youtu\.be|instagram\.com/reel|tiktok\.com' \
  pocket-export.csv > articles.csv

If you prefer a GUI: open the CSV in Numbers, Excel, or Google Sheets, filter by URL containing "youtube" or "tiktok" or "instagram.com/reel", copy to a new sheet, save as videos.csv. Same result.

Typical splits we've seen from imported Pocket libraries:

Don't worry if you have a few miscategorised — a YouTube link in your articles file or a Substack URL in videos. The receiving tools just won't process them weirdly; they'll save as plain bookmarks.

Step 3 — Articles → Raindrop or Instapaper

Both Raindrop and Instapaper accept CSV imports of saved URLs. Raindrop is generally the better long-term home for ex-Pocket users because the free tier is genuinely unlimited (100,000+ bookmarks supported on a free account) and the cross-browser sync is excellent. Instapaper is better if you read on Kindle a lot — it has a "send to Kindle" feature Raindrop doesn't.

Raindrop import

  1. Sign up at raindrop.io. Free, no credit card.
  2. Settings → Import → "Pocket" preset (yes, they kept it after the shutdown). Upload articles.csv.
  3. Tags, archive status, and add-date all transfer.
  4. Optional: pay $3/mo for Raindrop Pro to get full-text search of the article contents, not just titles. That's the one Pocket-equivalent feature missing on the free tier.

Instapaper import

  1. Sign up at instapaper.com.
  2. Settings → Import — Instapaper accepts a Pocket CSV directly.
  3. Read-later highlights and notes don't transfer (those were Pocket-only schemas), but URLs and basic metadata do.

Pick one, not both. Two read-later tools is two times the friction.

Step 4 — Videos → a transcript search tool

For videos, the question is no longer "where do I store the URL" (any bookmark manager does that) but "how do I find what was said in the video three months from now". That's what a transcript search tool is for, and it's the category Pocket never grew into.

Three real options we covered in our comparison post:

SavedThat import

  1. Sign up at savedthat.app. Email or Google. No credit card.
  2. Settings → Import → "CSV" → upload videos.csv. The importer reads the url column.
  3. Each video is queued for transcript fetching. YouTube videos land in ~10 seconds each; Instagram Reels and TikToks take 30-60 seconds because audio transcription is slower. Background job — close the tab and come back.
  4. Once imported, the ask field at the top of your library searches all transcripts. Try a query you know would have failed in Pocket: "the part where they talked about pricing strategy" or "стоимость привлечения клиентов" (multilingual — works on English transcripts).

Pocket's archive flag and tags don't transfer because SavedThat doesn't have an "archive" concept — videos are searchable forever, no archive needed. Tags can be added back manually if you want them; the search usually replaces the role tags played in Pocket.

What about Readwise Reader, Matter, and "Pocket but with AI"?

A lot of "Pocket replacement" posts that went up in 2025 recommended Readwise Reader. It's an excellent article-reading tool — far better at article reading than Pocket was — but its video support is the same shallow URL-bookmark experience Pocket had. If you're a heavy article reader plus an occasional video saver, Reader works. If you're video-first, you'll end up running the same migration we describe above with Reader filling the article slot.

Matter (the read-later app, not the unrelated matterapp.com) was discontinued in 2024. Don't migrate to it.

Several "AI-powered Pocket alternatives" launched in 2025 promising semantic search over saves. As of May 2026 most of them are either still article-only or were acquihired into bigger note-taking apps (Mem, Reflect). None are doing video-transcript search at the depth we built into SavedThat. Verify before paying — search "[tool name] video transcript search" before signing up.

Migration FAQ

Keep reading

guides

Best AI video bookmark manager in 2026: 4 tools compared

The best AI video bookmark manager in 2026 depends on what you save. Honest comparison of SavedThat, Mymind, Raindrop, and Glasp — pricing, search, platforms.

guides

Search inside saved videos: the complete 2026 guide

Search inside saved videos by what was actually said — across YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. How transcript search works in 2026, and four tools that do it.

guides

Make saved YouTube videos searchable (2026 guide)

Make saved YouTube videos searchable in 2026 — three concrete methods, from a 5-min browser trick to a full transcript search tool. Side-by-side comparison.

Frequently asked questions (2026)

When exactly did Pocket shut down?

Mozilla announced Pocket's discontinuation in 2025 and the service entered wind-down through the second half of the year. New saves were disabled first, then the mobile apps were removed from the App Store and Play Store, then the export window closed. The exact dates moved a couple of times during the wind-down — check the archived Pocket support pages on support.mozilla.org for the canonical timeline.

Can I still recover my Pocket data if I missed the export window?

If you never downloaded the CSV before the export window closed, the data is gone — Mozilla deleted user databases at the end of wind-down. The exceptions are: (1) you had a third-party integration (Zapier, IFTTT, Readwise) that was syncing your Pocket library elsewhere; (2) you'd already exported once and the CSV is still in your inbox or Downloads folder. Search your email for 'pocket export' before assuming it's lost.

Is Raindrop a true Pocket replacement?

For articles, yes — Raindrop's free tier is more generous than Pocket's ever was, sync is excellent across browsers and mobile, and the import is one click. Where it diverges: Raindrop is a bookmark manager, not a reader. You don't get Pocket's article-mode reformatted reading view. If reading is the workflow you cared about most, Instapaper or Readwise Reader will feel closer; if 'a place to save and re-find URLs' was the job, Raindrop wins.

Do I have to pay for video search?

No. SavedThat's free tier (30 saves/month) is enough to evaluate whether transcript search actually finds things you couldn't find before. If your Pocket library has fewer than 30 videos, you can migrate the whole thing on Free. For larger libraries the math usually favours one Pro month ($6.99) to absorb the migration, then downgrade back to Free.

What happens to my Pocket tags?

Pocket tags transfer cleanly into Raindrop (tag column is preserved in the import). They don't transfer into SavedThat by default because we don't have a tag concept yet — search by what was said usually obsoletes tags. If you used tags heavily for organisation and want them back, copy the tag column into the import CSV and we'll add manual tag support to videos based on user demand.

Can I run both Raindrop and SavedThat side by side?

Yes, that's actually the recommended setup for ex-Pocket users with mixed libraries. Raindrop owns articles (and any video URLs you don't care to search inside); SavedThat owns videos you actually want to re-find by quote. The two libraries don't sync to each other — they're separate by design — but each app has its own browser extension and share-extension, so saving from either context is a single click.