Leaving Diigo? How to Move Your Library, Tags and Annotations

Diigo has been a researcher's tool for a long time: save a page, highlight the passage that mattered, leave yourself a note, tag it, move on. If it still works for you, there's no reason to leave. This is for people who have decided to move and want the move to cost an afternoon, not their annotations.

The one export that matters: CSV

Diigo offers several export formats, and they are not equal. The browser bookmark formats carry the link and, at most, your tags. The CSV export also carries your descriptions, your comments and your highlighted passages, which is usually the reason you used Diigo in the first place.

To get it:

Log in to Diigo and open Tools.
Choose Export your library, near the bottom of the page.
Pick CSV and start the export.

Diigo emails you the file when it's ready, or you can download it from the Export History page once it finishes (you may need to refresh). Keep that file somewhere safe whether or not you move. It's your whole research trail in one place.

The CSV has these columns: title, url, tags, description, comments, annotations, and in some exports created_at.

Bring it into Cowpin

Upload the CSV as-is at Settings → Bookmarks → Import. There's no conversion step: Cowpin recognises Diigo's format and reads it directly.

Here is exactly what comes across:

Every link and its title.
Your tags, as Cowpin tags. Diigo writes them comma-separated; very old exports used spaces, and both work.
Your description, as the bookmark's blurb.
Your comments and your highlighted annotations, together in the bookmark's notes, so they stay readable and searchable.
The original save date, when your export includes created_at.

And what to expect:

Everything arrives private. Diigo's CSV has no privacy column, so imported bookmarks follow your Cowpin setting, which is private by default.
Nothing lands in your reading queue. The CSV has no unread state, so your library comes in as a library, not a backlog of thousands.
Re-running is safe. Cowpin skips any link that's already in your library, so a second import of the same file adds nothing twice.

The honest part: what Cowpin is not

Diigo's signature feature is the in-page highlighter: open a page and see your highlights painted back onto it. Cowpin doesn't do that. Your highlighted passages come across as text in each bookmark's notes, not as marks on the original page. Cowpin also has no equivalent of Diigo's groups.

What you get instead is a fast, tag-based library built around keeping things:

A readable copy of each page, saved in the background and searchable in full, so a link that dies later doesn't take your research with it.
Feeds and newsletters that file themselves. Follow an RSS or Atom feed, or forward a newsletter to your private Cowpin address, and new reading lands in your read-later list.
An open, Pinboard-compatible API and an export that always works: JSON, standard HTML or Delicious-style XML, whenever you want.

If the in-page highlighter is the part you can't live without, Diigo is still the better fit. If what you actually rely on is the library (the links, the tags, the notes you left yourself), it moves cleanly.

Ready? Start with the Diigo move guide, or go straight to Settings → Bookmarks → Import. For every other service you might be consolidating at the same time, see the 2026 importer matrix.