Goal: Change a smart (rule-based) collection into a manual (hand-picked) collection. The collection keeps its current products, its ID, and its URL, and you can then add or remove products by hand instead of through rules.

Prerequisites:

In your Shopify admin, go to Products > Collections and open the collection that you want to convert. From the More actions menu, click Export with Altera. Altera opens the export page with the Collections data type and a filter for this collection.

Select the Basic Columns, Sources & Conditions, and Linked Products field groups. Linked Products adds one row for every product that is in the collection now. Click Start export and download the file when the export is complete. Keep a copy of this file, because it records the collection's original rules.

Open the file. The first rows of the collection show its rules in the Condition: Field, Condition: Relation, and Condition: Value columns. Copy the number in the Source: ID column. This number identifies the set of rules that you replace with hand-picked products.

Copy the Sort: Product Handle column into the Condition: Value column, so that each row names one product. Delete the rows that have no product handle in Condition: Value.

On every row, set Condition: Field to Manual Selection, Inclusion: Type to Include, Source: Type to Products, and Source: Command to REPLACE, and put the number from step 2 in Source: ID. Clear the Condition: Relation, Condition: Match, and Inclusion: Match cells, because hand-picked products do not use them.

Set Command to MERGE on every row. Then delete every column except ID, Handle, Command, Source: ID, Source: Command, Source: Type, Inclusion: Type, Condition: Field, and Condition: Value. Save the file.

MERGE updates the existing collection, and Source: Command set to REPLACE replaces the rules of that source with the products in your file. The collection's title, description, image, and SEO fields stay as they are.

In Altera, click Upload file on the home page and select your file. Check that Altera detects the Collections data type, then click Start import.

When the import is complete, click the collection link in the import results to open the collection in your Shopify admin. The collection has no conditions, and it lists the products from your file as hand-picked products.

Your collection now contains the same products as before, but they are hand-picked instead of added by rules. New products that match the old rules are no longer added automatically. The collection keeps its ID and URL, so menus and links to it still work.

A file that converts the peak-performance collection, which had three products, looks like this: