Using existing passwords

There are a variety of ways to get Kee to work with passwords you already have stored in a KeePass database (or ones you have imported to KeePass from another password manager). The best approach is up to you but depending on how many you have and where they are stored, there are some approaches that I would recommend over others. This topic will help you to understand these options.

  1. Do nothing

    Good when: You’re pushed for time and most of your logins are for simple forms containing only a username and password field.

    This approach works because Kee always tries to fallback to the existing KeePass username and password. Kee has to guess which form fields are for the username and password - simple forms with just one text box and one password box are easy to get right but once forms contain multiple text or password boxes or other types of form field it gets more and more likely that Kee will get it wrong and that’s when the options below are worth considering.

    You might want to consider using the “never for this site” button in order to stop Kee asking you to save the login each time you login but of course this might backfire in the future if you actually want to save a new login somewhere on that site. If you have a few seconds to spare, options below might be better.

  2. Ask Kee to update the password after logging in

    Good when: You’re pushed for time. I.e.: try this first.

    This is probably the easiest way to gradually get all your passwords working perfectly with Kee since you only need to concern yourself with each password when you have actually used it to successfully log in.

  3. Allow Kee to save the login as a new entry in KeePass and then delete the old entry

    Good when: Doing nothing is proving either annoying or inaccurate and your login entries in KeePass are simple to re-create

    This is the easiest way to give Kee a helping hand to identify the correct login forms and correct fields within those forms. Obviously you should be careful before deciding to delete your old entries - consider whether any file attachments or history of entry changes are important before taking this approach.

  4. Allow Kee to save the login as a new entry in KeePass, modify the old entry and then delete the one Kee created

    Good when: Doing nothing is proving either annoying or inaccurate and your existing entry contains extra information that you would like to keep

    This is the most time consuming approach but does give you complete control over the final KeePass entry. You would typically want to use this when your KeePass entry already contains other information beyond simply a username and password.

    The idea is to get an entry into your database that contains all of the information that Kee would save if you were creating the entry from Kee to start with. You can then refer to the information shown in the Kee tab for the new entry in order to reproduce the relevant Kee data in your old entry. The key sections to look for are the URL and the Form fields.

    NB: The first text field is always the “username” and the first password is always the “password” - this will usually be the first text field or password on the visible web page but that’s not guaranteed.

Finally, unless you are re-creating all of your entries via Kee you’ll probably have at least some entries that do not have a website icon (favicon). You might find it easier to differentiate between logins if you use the KeePass Favicon Downloader plugin to get those icons. You might also want to use that plugin from time to time to update the entries that Kee creates because Kee won’t update the icons once its first created the entry and websites do change their icons occasionally.

Looking at the page on using existing passwords. I would like to use Method 4 but not sure the details on how to do this option.

Thanks
John

I would like to use Method 4 but not sure the details on how to do this option.

When you Edit an entry that Kee has created, the “Kee > Form fields” tab shows various bits of data specific to the website’s login page. You could therefore copy things like the “Name” and “Id” from the new (temporary) entry into your original KeePass entry for the main “KeePass username” and “KeePass password” fields. There may be several other fields listed too which you’d probably want to manually duplicate into the original entry - the details are entirely specific to each web site / login entry.

so, in other words, Kee does not use the existing passwords I imported into KeePass. I have to manually enter the passwords. Not much time saving. Especially as Kee doesn’t remember new Kee passwords. For example I logged into this Kee forum with my account, and asked Kee to create a new entry in KeePass. When I logged on to the Kee forum later, there were no Kee icons in the fields, and I had to manually re-enter the username and password.

There should be very few cases where Kee can’t offer to save a new password. If you click the button to save the password into the database, it will work (or at least, in nearly 10 years no one has ever reported any bug on any website where this has failed).

When I logged on to the Kee forum later, there were no Kee icons in the fields, and I had to manually re-enter the username and password.

That is more likely to be a problem filling the form rather than an indication that the password was not saved into KeePass (you can check inside your KeePass database though).

It does look as though a recent update to this forum software has changed the login form in a way that makes it incompatible with Kee, which is awkward. There’s nothing we can do about that in the short term but perhaps will be able to offer some workarounds in the future. Note that you can used the matched logins option from the Kee menu in order to access the username and password and copy/paste them from there in these rare cases where auto-fill doesn’t work. Not perfect I know, but a step up from having to switch back and forth to KeePass at least.

Thanks for the response luckyrat!
I’ll keep the Kee forum problem in mind.

When I logged in this time, there was no problem!
which is good news.
KennMacd