How Does Skylight Magic Import Work? (Plain-English Guide)

Skylight Magic Import is the feature that turns a photo or PDF of a schedule into events on your Skylight Calendar, no typing required. It's a genuinely clever bit of the product, and it's usually the reason people get excited about the device in the first place. Here's exactly how it works, straight from how Skylight describes it.

What Magic Import does

At its simplest, Magic Import reads a schedule for you. Instead of typing each game, practice, or appointment into the calendar by hand, you hand Skylight the source document and it pulls out the events. A team schedule, a school-year PDF, a flyer from the backpack, a screenshot from the group chat: all fair game, as long as the dates and times are visible.

How it works, step by step

According to Skylight's support documentation, there are two ways in.

Method 1: In the Skylight app. This is the quick one, and it feels a lot like any scan-a-schedule app.

1. Open the Skylight app and select a calendar.
2. Tap Sidekick, then Import Events.
3. Take a photo of the schedule, or pick one from your camera roll.
4. Choose who it's for. Tap the family profiles the events should go to.
5. Review and add. Sidekick shows the events it found so you can confirm or edit, then adds them to the calendar.

Method 2: By email. Useful when the schedule arrived as an email or a PDF attachment already.

1. Find your calendar's email address, in the form yourdevicename@ourskylight.com, listed in the app.
2. Forward or send the schedule to it. Attach the PDF, photo, screenshot, or spreadsheet.
3. Optionally name a profile by putting it in the subject line.
4. Skylight reads and imports, then emails you a confirmation with an option to reverse the import if something looks off.

What you need first

A few things have to be in place before Magic Import will do anything:

• The Calendar Plus subscription. This is the big one. Skylight lists Magic Import as a Plus feature, and Plus costs $79 per year. Without Plus, there's no Magic Import.
• The Skylight app or a Skylight Calendar. Imported events land in your Skylight calendar. They can sync to your own Google or Apple iCloud calendar, but only if you set up two-way sync first (Outlook and Yahoo are display-only).
• An activated calendar with the time zone set. Skylight notes the feature won't process events correctly until setup is complete.

What it can and can't read

It handles: text emails, PDFs, spreadsheets, and image files such as .png and .jpg, including screenshots and photos of documents that show event information.

It struggles when: the source doesn't show a clear month and date, or the image is too messy to parse. Skylight also notes the feature is relatively new, so accuracy can vary with how complex the source material is. That's normal for this kind of tool. Always glance at the confirmation before trusting the import.

If you like the idea but not the hardware

Plenty of people read about Magic Import and think "I want that reading trick, but I don't want to buy into a whole other calendar." Fair. The capture is only half the story. The other half is where the events end up.

Magic Import drops events into the Skylight ecosystem: Skylight's app, Skylight's calendar, Skylight's profiles, behind the $79-a-year Plus plan. A standalone picture-to-calendar app does the same photo-to-events step but writes straight to the calendar your family already shares. With PicCal, you snap the schedule and the events land in Apple or Google Calendar, so they're right where you already check them, and there's no device to buy and no Plus subscription. We ran a 24-event travel-ball PDF through it and all 24 games imported with the correct dates.

Magic Import is a smart feature, and for Skylight owners it earns its keep. If you're still deciding, the real choice is whether you want the events on a dedicated screen or on the calendar already in your pocket.