# Switching from Eagle

Your Eagle library, imported in one step. Eagle keeps working meanwhile, and nothing in it is touched.

*Written from Teserra 1.3.16.*

**In short**

1. Quit Eagle.
2. At Teserra's welcome, choose **From another app** and pick your .library folder.
3. Confirm. Originals are copied; your Eagle library is not touched.

## What comes along

- **Folders** become collections, nested as they were.
- **Tags** stay tags. **Names** become titles, **notes** become descriptions.
- **Palettes** and **dates**: the day you added something to Eagle stays its import date in Teserra.
- Left behind: items in Eagle's trash, star ratings and source URLs. For now only images come along; videos, PDFs, SVG files and fonts stay in Eagle.

## How

1. Quit Eagle, so the library is not being written to.
2. In Teserra, at the welcome screen, choose **From another app**.
3. Pick your .library folder (the one that contains `metadata.json`). Teserra recognizes it and tells you what it found.
4. Confirm. Originals are **copied** into your vault; your Eagle library is not modified.

![The import screen after picking an Eagle library: 2,481 items, 3.4 GB, its path, what comes along and what stays behind, and Import into Vault Studio.](https://teserra.app/assets/snips/eagle-import.webp)
*Point Teserra at your Eagle library and it says what it found before importing anything.*

Into a library you already use, **File → Import Folder…** on the same .library folder starts the import straight away, with no summary first.

> **Time and space.** A large library takes a few minutes, thumbnails included. Your vault will roughly match the size of your Eagle library, so check the destination disk first.

## What is different afterwards

Your files are ordinary files in ordinary folders, with a small text sidecar next to each one. There is no proprietary database holding them: the SQLite file Teserra keeps is a cache, rebuilt from the folder on demand. [Where your files live](https://teserra.app/docs/vault-format)

Two Eagle habits have Teserra equivalents: **Smart folders** are among the [ideas we are exploring](https://teserra.app/roadmap#exploring), as collections that fill themselves; **browser extensions** exist for Chrome, Firefox and Safari. [Full comparison](https://teserra.app/compare)