Two things break Anki for new users. Turning a textbook chapter into cards eats an evening, and once a deck passes 200-300 cards the default browser stops helping you find anything. Add-ons fix both problems. The five below come from The AnKing, who runs more than 60 add-ons in his own setup and picked these as the ones that pay off no matter what you study.
Where This Anki Add-on List Comes From
Sixty-plus add-ons is a power user’s toolkit, not a starting point. The five here target the friction beginners actually hit: turning existing material (textbooks, diagrams, notes) into cards, finding cards once the collection grows, and surviving the review spike that follows a bulk import.
Everything installs through Anki’s built-in browser at Tools > Add-ons > Get Add-ons. Butler is the exception, and it handles the rest of them for you.
Butler: Install All Recommended Add-ons at Once
The manual loop is tedious. Open Tools > Add-ons, click Get Add-ons, type a name, click Install, restart Anki, repeat 10-20 times. Butler turns that into one action.
It installs over 60 recommended add-ons and pre-configures their settings in a single step. Instead of an afternoon of searching and restarting, you get a working setup and move on to studying.
Installation: open Anki, go to Tools > Add-ons, click Get Add-ons, search “Butler”, install, restart. A setup wizard appears on launch and walks you through installing and configuring the recommended set.
Image Occlusion for Instant Visual Flashcards
Anatomy, chemistry, and anything else built on diagrams punish manual card creation. One circulatory system image can justify 15-20 cards: one per major vessel, one per chamber, one per valve. Typing those out by hand costs more time than the studying itself.
Image Occlusion collapses that. Import an image from disk or paste a screenshot from your clipboard, drag boxes over the regions you want tested, and each box becomes its own flashcard. The front shows the image with that region hidden; the back can carry your notes.
The pattern holds for any labeled visual: medical diagrams, historical maps, circuit schematics, syntax diagrams, architectural plans. In Anki’s Add Card window, find the Image Occlusion button, load your image, draw your rectangles, and click Generate. One picture becomes a full study set.
Edit Field During Review for Quick Image Resizing
An image that’s too small to read or too big for the card taxes attention you should be spending on recall. Without this add-on you either squint through it or quit the review session, hand-edit the card’s HTML, and start over.
Edit Field During Review keeps you in the reviewer. Hold Cmd (Mac) or Ctrl (Windows), click the image, and drag its edges to the size you want. Double-click restores the original. The session never breaks.
Keeping Tags and the Sidebar Organized
Past 500 cards, Anki’s sidebar turns into one long flat scroll of tags with no structure to grab onto. Two add-ons bring it back under control.
Hierarchical Tags (free) nests tags into a tree in the browser sidebar. Rather than scrolling past Anatomy, AnatomyMuscles, AnatomyNerves, and AnatomyVessels as four separate entries, you get Anatomy with Muscles, Nerves, and Vessels folded underneath it.
Customize Sidebar handles the rest of the clutter. Add shortcuts such as a Flags section for priority cards, and collapse decks or note types you aren’t touching. Together the two turn a scroll-hunt into a hierarchy you can actually read: collapse everything inactive, leave only the decks you’re studying this month.
Better Search for Advanced Browser Queries
Anki’s built-in search reads card content and stops there. Better Search (formerly Browser Search Box) extends it to deck and tag names, plus filters based on card properties.
prop:duetargets cards by when they’re dueprop:ivltargets cards by review interval, which is how you find mature cardssuspended:truepulls up suspended cardsfield:Definitionsearches only inside the Definition field of a given note type
On its own that’s faster browsing. Paired with ReMemorize, it becomes a way to grab a specific slice of your collection and reschedule the whole thing at once.
ReMemorize for Manual Card Rescheduling
Import 100 new cards and Anki hands all 100 to you on day one, well past whatever daily limit you set. ReMemorize lets you push individual cards, or a whole selection, to a date you choose, straight from the reviewer.
The number you enter behaves differently depending on its sign. A negative number moves only the due date, which works like a temporary bury when you want to see something later. A positive number moves the due date and the card’s future interval together, spacing it the way a normal review would.
Combine it with Better Search and the workflow scales. Select cards with a query like prop:due or prop:ivl, then redistribute them across future days, randomized if you want the spread uneven. Anki treats a card as mature once its interval hits 21 days or more, and those are the safest ones to move in bulk since they’ve already proven you remember them. A 100-card batch spreads across two weeks instead of landing in one brutal session.
Installing Anki Add-ons: Procedure and Boundaries
Add-ons install through Tools > Add-ons > Get Add-ons: search by name, click Install, restart Anki. You can also browse ankiweb.net/shared/addons in a web browser and install from there.
One caveat worth knowing before you build a workflow around any of these. Add-ons don’t update alongside Anki, so an Anki update can break one until its author ships a fix. Your options are to wait for that fix or roll Anki back to a prior version if you need the add-on immediately. Configuring each add-on’s advanced settings is a separate exercise: Butler does it automatically, everything else is manual.
To remove a broken add-on, select it in the Add-ons window and click Delete.
Connecting Add-ons to Spaced Repetition Workflows
Every flashcard system runs on two mechanisms: turning knowledge into a question with a testable answer, and spacing the review of that question over time. These add-ons split cleanly along that line. Image Occlusion and Edit Field During Review handle creation and cleanup; Better Search and ReMemorize handle timing and load.
Which ones matter depends on what you’re studying. Visual subjects like anatomy, chemistry, or history save hours through Image Occlusion. Large imported sets need Better Search and ReMemorize to flatten the spike. The 21-day maturity threshold is your guide to which cards can safely be moved when the queue gets ugly.
Studying instead of maintaining your deck
The add-ons above fix Anki’s rough edges, but the underlying work stays yours. You still write every question and answer, still decide what’s worth testing, still rebuild your tag structure when a subject grows past what you planned for. Beginners often spend more of week one configuring their setup than reviewing anything in it.
Picture the other version. You take notes on a chapter the way you normally would, and the cards, quizzes, and summaries come out of those notes without a separate card-writing session. Review timing sorts itself out in the background.
That’s the shape of Fluxo: spaces and topics for your own rich-text notes, AI-generated flashcards, quizzes, and summaries built from what you wrote, and spaced-repetition scheduling that brings material back on its own. No ready-made courses and no shared deck library, since the notes are yours to write. A mascot, streaks, and gamified sessions keep the review habit going, and AI suggestions point at topics worth covering next.