Magic Import, the part of Plannie Assistant that reads photos, PDFs and links, turns a flyer or term calendar into events on your calendar. This page also covers every other way a date gets in: a forwarded email, a subscribed feed, a sentence said to Siri. It’s for any parent tired of retyping the same dates by hand.
Six ways in, one calendar
From email
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Every household gets its own @mail.plannie.io address at creation. Find or change it under Settings → General → Family inbox. Forward the school newsletter, PDF attachments and all, and Plannie reads the message and every attachment, then replies with a summary, one line per event. Name someone in the subject line (“Vera, Liam”) to assign those events to them instead of the whole family. The first email from a new sender is held until the household owner approves it with one tap; anything nobody actions is discarded after 30 days.
How forwarding email to your Family Inbox works → From a photo
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Open Magic Import and snap the paper schedule off the fridge, or pick a group-chat screenshot from your photo library, up to four images at once. Plannie reads in the background, so you’re free to leave the app while it works, then sends a “Magic Import done — 2 events, 1 recipe” message plus a notification, but only on your own devices, never the kitchen screen. Photos you choose are treated as trusted, so each event applies immediately rather than waiting for a preview, with one-tap Undo on everything created.
Photo to calendar, step by step → From a school flyer
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The flyer from the backpack usually has three events on it: bake sale, class trip, picture day. Photograph it once, and Magic Import splits the dates on the page into separate events and attaches the photo to each one it creates. Open the event and tap the thumbnail to see the flyer again if you need to check a detail. It’s the same Magic Import that reads any photo, so a stack of flyers from different activities works too, up to four in one import. Photographing the same flyer twice by accident won’t create duplicate events.
What a school flyer turns into → From a PDF
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Term calendars and club schedules usually arrive as PDFs, and Plannie reads them natively: selectable text and scanned or rendered pages both, so a photocopied newsletter saved as a PDF works the same as a typed one. Share a file from Files or Photos and Magic Import opens with it already attached; each date on the page becomes its own event, however many pages the document runs to. An import takes up to four files of 10 MB each. If the PDF came by email, forward that email to your Family Inbox instead.
Reading term-date PDFs → With Siri
Needs iPhone or iPad. No setup, no account linking
Say it while your hands are full: “Add a dentist appointment for Vera.” Siri reads the event back and asks you to confirm before creating it, so nothing lands on the calendar by accident; chores and list items skip that step and apply straight away. Every voice action is attributed to Siri in the household’s activity log. It follows your device’s language (English, Swedish, German, Spanish or French) but matches set phrases rather than free-form requests, so moving a repeating event by voice won’t work.
Every Siri phrase Plannie understands → From an ICS feed
Free plan: up to 4 connected calendars
Paste the webcal:// or .ics link (a football club’s fixture list, a school portal’s term dates, a partner’s shared iCloud calendar) under Settings → Family & access → a member → Sync & calendars → Connect a calendar → Calendar feed (ICS), and it becomes a self-updating layer in the shared, colour-coded view. Feeds are view-only; Plannie never writes back to them, which is also how Apple/iCloud calendars come in, since Apple has no two-way sync API to connect to. They refresh about once an hour; Google and Outlook recheck every 15 minutes.
Subscribing an ICS or webcal feed → Family Inbox and Magic Import are Plannie Premium features; calendar feeds are free. See what’s in Plannie Premium.
What happens after Plannie reads something
A pasted link previews first, and nothing saves until you confirm. Photos and PDFs are trusted and applied at once, each with Undo. An unapproved sender’s email waits for approval. Siri confirms before creating anything.
Tap Category / assign to before importing and those members get the events; by email, subject-line names do the same. A deadline in the source becomes a real due date. Everything is labelled in the activity log with its source.
An event’s Sync to calendar field picks which connected calendars get a copy. Members can set a Default calendar for the profile too. Google and Outlook stay two-way; ICS feeds, iCloud included, never sync back.
