Anki add-on to backfill fields including media and audio using Yomitan's API
- Install the Yomitan API like specified in the README.
- Install the add-on from AnkiWeb
- Restart Anki
Create a Backup of your profile/deck before doing any of these steps
Make sure your Browser is running and the API is working.
Run on deck
- Go to
Tools -> Backfill from Yomitanin the top bar. - Select your deck in the
Deckdropdown
Run on select cards
- Select Cards you want to backfill in
Browse - Go to
Edit -> Backfill from Yomitanin the top bar of the card browser.
General Steps
- For
Expression Fieldchoose the expression field (e.g.Expressionin Lapis) of your note type, this is the field that will be queried into Yomitan. - Optionally choose a
Reading Field(e.g.ExpressionReadingin Lapis) to differentiate expressions using their reading. If left blank, the add-on uses the first result Yomitan returns. - For
Fieldchoose the field to backfilled. - In
Handlebartype in the Yomitan handlebar, from which you wish to pull data from (e.g.frequency-harmonic-rank). You can concatenate multiple handlebars using a,(e.g.single-glossary-jmdict-2025-08-08,single-glossary-デジタル大辞泉) - Optionally tick
Replaceif you wish to replace the current content of the field in every card. - Press
Run.
You can cancel backfilling by pressing on the close button of the processing popup. Changes can be undone with Edit -> Undo or with CTRL + Z.
Depending on the dictionaries, backfilling can cause a large amount of inline css to be added to your cards. You can use the Inline CSS Cleanup addon to reduce your collection size.
You can backfill multiple fields using a .json preset. Presets are stored in the user_files folder in the addon directory. An example for Lapis is included and can be found here.
Format:
{
"targets": {
"FieldName": {
"handlebar": "{handlebar}",
"replace": true
},
"FieldName2": {
"handlebar": "{handlebar2},{handlebar3}",
"replace": false
},
...
}
}
handlebar and replace behave identically to above.
Make sure every handlebar in the preset is a valid handlebar in Yomitan. Otherwise backfilling will fail, because all handlebars are requested in a single API call. For the included Lapis preset, this means adjusting the MainDefinition handlebar to the one matching your preferred dictionary.
Tools -> Add-ons -> backfill-anki-yomitan -> Config
max_entries
Default: 4
Amount of entries to request when Reading Field is specified.
reading_handlebar
Default: reading
Handlebar used to compare against Reading Field.
yomitan_api_ip
Default: 127.0.0.1
yomitan_api_port
Default: 19633
yomitan_api_timeout
Default: 10
If you're backfilling audio, please be aware that retrieving audio, depending on the audio sources configured in Yomitan, can be quite slow. You can reduce the time by decreasing max_entries in the config.
If you encounter any issues, please report them on GitHub or in the add-on's TMW #resources-sharing thread. Please attach the backfill-log.log file, which can be found in the add-on's user_files directory.
