Getting a Notion database of links out of the table and into Muse

A lot of design and research teams end up here by accident. A Notion database starts as a place to track sources for one project: a URL column, maybe a Tags column, a Status column for read or unread. It works well for exactly that, structured rows, filters, a shared view the whole team can edit. Then it keeps growing, because Notion is genuinely good at holding structured information and nobody ever deletes a row.

The trouble shows up later, once the database holds hundreds of links to images, references and mood boards rather than articles. Notion was not built to show a grid of pictures. This is the honest case for moving a visual links database out of Notion and the honest way to do it, since Muse reads a Notion export but does not talk to Notion directly.

Why a links database in Notion stops working

Notion earns its place for structured data and collaboration. A table of links with columns for tags, status and a note is exactly the kind of thing Notion is built for, and several people can edit it at once without stepping on each other. None of that is the problem.

The problem is the grid view. Notion's gallery layout pulls a thumbnail from each row's cover image, when one exists, and shows it at a size closer to a stamp than a preview. There is no way to search by what an image looks like, no way to search the text sitting inside a screenshot, and no way to sort by colour. Past a couple of hundred rows, a links database in Notion is a table with occasional decoration, not a place you can actually look through and recognise things on sight.

How do you export a Notion database as CSV?

Open the database as its own full page rather than a view embedded inside another page, since the export option lives on the database itself.

1. Open the database as a full page and click the ••• menu in the top right corner.
2. Choose Export from the menu.
3. Set the format to Markdown and CSV. Notion bundles both into one download; the CSV sits inside the zip file alongside a folder of Markdown files.
4. Decide whether to include subpages. Turn this on only if you also want the written content inside each row. It adds one Markdown file per row and does not change the CSV itself.
5. Click Export and wait for the download, then unzip the file.

Notion documents this process, including the export scope and format options, on its own export help page.

What does the CSV actually contain?

Worth being precise about this before treating an export as a full copy of the database. A Notion CSV export holds the database's own properties as columns, whatever you built: a title column, since Notion's default primary property exports as Name, plus one column for every property you added, URL, Tags, Status, a date, and so on.

It does not hold the page content of each row. If a row carries its own written notes beyond the property fields, that text lives on the row's page rather than in a spreadsheet cell, and it only comes across if you turned on Include subpages, as a separate Markdown file per row sitting next to the CSV rather than inside it. Nor does the CSV embed any files or images uploaded directly into Notion, only the property values that reference them. For a links database this is rarely a loss, since a URL, a title and a tag list is usually the whole record. For a database with real writing in each row, keep the Markdown files too.

One property decides whether the import works

A CSV full of rows is not automatically a bookmarks file. Muse has no dedicated Notion importer, so it reads the export through the same generic importer built for Raindrop, which looks for a column literally named url, href or link. If every link in the database only exists as plain text in the title, or as an inline mention, there is nothing for that column to find, and the file comes in as a spreadsheet with no bookmarks recognised rather than as a library.

The fix is a genuine URL property on the database, of the URL type, filled in for every row, before you export. Two more property names are worth knowing, since Muse's importer looks for them too: a Tags property carries straight across as tags on each item, and a select property named Collection or Folder gets read as the collection to file each item into, so a status or category column can double as a first pass at organising.

How do you import the CSV into Muse?

1. Open Muse and go to Settings, then Library.
2. Find the Import section and click the button labelled Raindrop CSV. It is the same button and the same importer for any CSV with a URL column, Notion's export included; there is no separate Notion option because none is needed.
3. Choose the CSV file from the unzipped export.
4. Let Muse read it. Title, URL, tags and, where the columns exist, note and collection all come across on the same pass, and each link lands as a card with a preview image, where the page publishes one.

What does not come across

A link import is a copy of what the CSV held, not a copy of the whole database. Formulas, relations to other databases, comments and Notion's own views and filters stay in Notion, because none of that is data the CSV carries. If a row's real value was the writing on its own page rather than the link, the CSV alone will not bring that across; use the Markdown files from the same export for that content instead.

What does survive is the part a visual library actually needs: the link, the title, the tags, and a preview of the page. Notion stays free for personal use and remains the right tool for the database itself, the tables, the filters, the shared editing. The reason to also keep a copy in Muse is not that Notion is expensive or broken. It is that a table was never going to show a grid of images you recognise on sight, and that is a different job.