New to 1PW. Have over 500 PWs save in chrome and key chain.

cam_mochan

I just purchased and installed a 1password account for my family of 5 a few days ago. We all have passwords saved in chrome on our PCs and keychain for our apple products (macbook, iphones, ipads) as well as other places. From chrome, passwords would populate automatically on each site and on an iphone, a password bar would pop up with an option to use a password stored with a certain username and could be executed simply selecting the suggested username. Both chrome and keychain asked to update passwords when they changed which was convenient.

I found using chrome and keychain as my pseudo password manager worked fine and it was pretty easy. I also kept a list of passwords in another place for reference when needed. My wife had more challenges and always seemed to not have the right password when she needed it both on her PC as well as iphone. I'm not sure how she had password management set up in her browser and phone so that could certainly be one of the issues.

My three kids are now getting to the age of having many passwords and are asking what's the best way to manage them. I asked a lot of people how they managed family passwords and 1Password was the overwhelming answer.

So I am in the process of converting my passwords as well as my families passwords to 1PW. This is where the challenges began.

The first thing I did, based on a "how to" article I found through google, was exporting my passwords from chrome to a .CSV file then into 1password. I was very surprised to see 514 items listed in my new 1PW vault!

When I have tried to log into websites in both chrome and my phone, it seemed like the chrome and keychain password managers were still poping up, not 1PW. I think 1PW is poping up first in safari on my iphone, but chrome on my iphone is still defaulting to the chrome password manager. The only way I can get 1PW to open is by clicking the 1PW icon on my browser toolbar. From there, a list of items dropdown and I have to pick the correct one. Often, I pick the incorrect one.

From another article I read, I deactivated the autofill and passwords in both chrome and my iphone but the chrome and iphone passwords managers still popup, not 1PW.

I then read another article that said if there are duplicate items listed for a site, 1PW won't autofill. Google alone has over 30 items listed in my new 1PW vault, many with the same user name. Then I read another that said the best way to get passwords converted to 1PW from other platforms like chrome was NOT to export them in bulk but allow 1PW to save each password one at a time as they were used. Not sure if this means manually entering them or leaving other password managers active at the same time as 1PW.

Bottom line is I am now very confused and not sure what to do. It would be great if 1PW worked like chrome on my PCs and like keychain on my phone and auto-populated logins for sites as I used them without me having to guess which item to select from a long list.

Based on the high recommendations I have gotten about 1PW and the many articles that say it is easy to use, I have now concluded I must be doing something wrong so wanted to go directly to the source and ask the pros how to proceed before I try anything else suggested in an article.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

PS.

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1Password Version: 7.2.617 Windows Client
Extension Version: 4.7.3.90 Chrome
OS Version: Windows 7 Professional
Sync Type: Not Provided
Referrer: forum-search:New to 1PW. Have over 500 PWs save in chrome and key chain.

littlebobbytables

Hi @cam_mochan,

As you kindly reported the versions for the various components involved I believe part of what you're experiencing will be done to certain implementational differences between 1Password and Chrome. Let's see if I can provide an explanation that helps :smile:

1Password will never fill fields without first seeking user approval. That's been part of 1Password for as long as I've known of it. We do this for security reasons. In the past (and more than once) it has been shown that the completely automatic filling of fields can be used against the user in ways where they don't even know it's happening. We completely step around that issue by having all filling being explicitly initiated by the user. On Windows, with the companion extension, the keyboard shortcut ctrl +\ will instruct 1Password to fill the current page. If you have only one matching Login item 1Password will select that one automatically. If you have more than one equal match then 1Password will display the helper interface, allowing you to select the item you would like to use. If you wish to fill with an Identity or Credit Card item you will always need to access the helper interface and there are two main ways of doing so; the 1Password button in the browser toolbar or the keyboard shortcut alt + ctrl + \.

Now 1Password also supports something known as open-and-fill and you might see this in action and think "I didn't use ctrl + \ so what gives?" It has the hint of automation but it's really just the chaining of two commands; the first to open the URL stored in the Login item and the second to fill that page with this item. If you were to copy and paste the URL and load the page that way you would find 1Password wouldn't fill until instructed.

Now if you're not a fan of the keyboard shortcut or the way that the companion extension works there is an alternative and it's called 1Password X. It's designed as a standalone extension and allows us to support the likes of ChromeOS or Linux where we don't have a dedicated 1Password client. As it's a standalone extension it has to supply all of its own UI (User Interface) and there we've gone for an inline menu that gets attached to fields. 1Password X still won't fill unless instructed but you might find the prompts it offers more intuitive compared to the more hands-off approach of the companion extension. There is also a degree of automation here that isn't present with the companion extension. If you instruct 1Password X to fill stage 1 of a multi-stage sign-in form e.g. Google then 1Password X will attempt to fill the second stage using the same item once that stage is ready for filling. It will do the same for TOTP codes as well if the Login item has one stored in it (Use 1Password as an authenticator for sites with two-factor authentication). It blurs the line a little but there is always the first command to 1Password, it won't start trying to second guess and fill a field that it either correctly or incorrectly infers is related to signing in to some service.

Once you're confident that 1Password is working and that your various credentials that were stored in Chrome are now correctly recorded by 1Password we do recommend disabling autofill in the browser and our support page Turn off the built-in password manager in your browser. The reason we recommend this is multiple sources of data can easily become divergent from one another and that will almost always generate confusion. I've seen it many times and the only real way to ensure it doesn't is to only use one source. I believe Chrome is extra aggressive though and it will continue to auto-fill even after disabling it, if I remember correctly Chrome basically forces you to delete all the entries to tame it. For that I would recommend going through them one-by-one so you don't accidentally lose anything. Not fun, tedious is a good word but it's better to be thorough.

It sounds like you might need to do some pruning of your 1Password database as well if you're finding multiple items that appear to be the same account for a single site. That will be somewhat of a manual process as well I'm afraid. 1Password for Mac has a couple of tools to try and help remove duplicates but this is an area where 1Password for Windows is still performing a bit of catching up. The Watchtower section of 1Password for Windows does have a Reused Passwords section that may come in useful though. If you find two entries for the same site with the same visible username and 1Password is telling you they're duplicate passwords one of them can likely be safely deleted.

As for the argument between exporting passwords in CSV form and manually creating Login items one by one. I'd probably say the CSV approach could be easier even if there are gaps that need corrected. As long as it has successfully exported all the data then even when you come across entries that don't work properly as long as you still have a record of the username and password then there things that can be attempted to correct whatever went wrong. A good support page here is likely one of the ones I link to the most frequently, How to save a Login manually in your browser. You can use the username and password stored in the item to manually save a new Login item which may fare better. Why would the new item stand a chance? because of everything that 1Password can learn from the page when saving that it can't from a somewhat terse list of just the username and password.

That's a fair bit to throw at you and you may have a bunch of questions. I'll let you absorb all of that and we can take it from there :smile: