How to import your passwords to Chrome and the Google Password Manager

One way, however, that these built-in password managers haven’t stood up to their independent competitors is how tricky it was to get preexisting passwords into their systems. That, however, may be changing.

If you tend to hang out in the Google ecosystem and / or you have an Android mobile device, that means you can be using the Google Password Manager to store and sync your passwords via the Chrome browser. Until recently, though, Google Chrome made it extremely difficult to import passwords from a CSV file. Now, however, it’s quite simple.

This is a lot easier than the previous workarounds that I tried in order to import a CSV file into Chrome. Just for the sake of historical interest, here’s what you used to have to do in order to get your passwords into Chrome’s password manager:

The only way to do it that I could find was to try to enable a disabled Chrome feature that allows you to import passwords. After searching online, I found several methods to enable it, depending on which version of Chrome you’re running. I am currently running version 88, and while I was able to use the following method to add the import command to Chrome (thank you to Guiding Tech for pointing me toward this possible solution), my copy of Chrome was never able to actually import the CSV file I had downloaded from LastPass.

Be that as it may, here is the process I used. I’ll let you know how I finally managed to get my passwords into Chrome right afterward.

If that works for you — great! If not, then there is a last desperate way to get your passwords into Chrome, which is the one that finally worked for me.

Now that your passwords are in Firefox, you can transfer them easily to Chrome:

Update June 9th, 2022, 5:06PM ET: This article was originally published on February 26th, 2021, and has been updated to explain that Chrome can import CSV files.