What's actually inside your calendar export?
Calendar apps hand you a file and no way to see into it. That is fine until the file is short — trimmed by a free-plan limit, or missing the half of your year you actually cared about — and you find out months later, from the appointment you missed. This reads the file and tells you what is in it, before you rely on it.
Drop in one .ics file or several — apps that export one per family member are the usual case, so pick them all at once. They are read in your browser: nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored, and there is no account.
The two numbers worth reading
How far ahead the last event sits. This is the one that catches people. Several family apps only show — and therefore only export — a month or so ahead on a free plan. The file looks healthy, opens fine, and quietly contains a fraction of your year. If the last event is a few weeks out and your calendar holds more than that, the export was trimmed and the fix is upstream, not here.
How many events repeat. The weekly swimming lesson, the Tuesday pickup, the monthly rent. Repeating events are stored as one entry plus a rule, and rules are the part most likely to arrive differently in a different app. A calendar that is mostly repeating events will need more checking after a move than one that is mostly one-offs.
Where the file can go
An .ics is not owned by whoever gave it to you. It opens anywhere:
- Google Calendar — Settings → Import & export → Import, then choose which calendar it lands in.
- Apple Calendar — File → Import, or just double-click the file.
- Outlook — File → Open & Export → Import/Export → Import an iCalendar (.ics) file.
- A spreadsheet — use the CSV button above; Excel, Numbers and Google Sheets open it directly. It is the fastest way to get a year of family commitments onto one screen.
We would rather write that down than pretend the only sensible destination is our own app. The point of an export is that your calendar stops being held anywhere in particular — including here.
Moving off a specific app
If you are leaving something and want the whole route rather than just the file check, we wrote those up: moving from Cozi, where the export is a link rather than a button, and getting out of Maple, which shuts down and deletes everything on 31 December 2026.
Questions
Is my calendar uploaded anywhere?
No. The file is read by JavaScript in your own browser. Nothing is sent to a server, nothing is stored, and there is no account. Turn off your network connection and the page still works — that is the honest test, and it costs you nothing to run it.
What is an .ics file?
iCalendar, the standard format calendars export to. Google, Apple, Outlook, Cozi, TimeTree and most family apps can write one, and any of them can read one back. It is plain text: you can open it in a text editor and see the events, if you like that sort of thing.
Why is the preview only 20 events?
To keep the page readable. The counts above the table cover the whole file, and the merge and CSV buttons use every event in it, not the first twenty.
It says entries could not be read — is my file broken?
Usually not. Calendar files can hold entries that are not events — tasks, free/busy blocks, timezone definitions — and anything that isn't an event is counted separately rather than silently dropped. If the count is small next to the number of events, nothing is wrong.
Can I check a file from any app, not just family calendars?
Yes. It is a plain iCalendar reader with no idea which app produced the file.
Who made this
Somiya is a family organizer: one shared calendar, shared lists and tasks, and reminders that go to whoever actually has to act rather than whoever typed them in. No ads, encrypted on your phone and on our servers, hosted in the EU. It imports .ics files with a preview and a 30-minute undo — but this checker works whether or not you ever install it, which is the point.
Something wrong on this page, or a file it reads badly? Tell us at hello@somiya.app and we will fix it.