Creative Ways To Use Safari Bookmarks

Safari bookmarks seem straight-forward. But you can do some creative things to get more use from them. You can use emoji in bookmark names, create folders and subfolders, and even add descriptions to bookmarks to make research easier.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Let's look at some creative ways to use Safari Bookmarks. As an example let's say you want to create a folder where you save some MacMost videos that you want to go back and review later on. 
Now the first thing you want to do is you want to take a look at how you have Bookmarks setup. You can go to Bookmarks, Show Bookmarks which is going to bring them up on the left sidebar here. But to actually get a view where you can really manipulate things you want to go to Edit Bookmarks. It brings it up on one big page here. I've just got the Favorites folder and inside the Favorites folder I've got just something close to the Default set. Let's create a new folder though that we're going to use in Bookmarks. Let's call this MacMost Videos. Now it doesn't appear here in the Favorites bar but if I go to Bookmarks I can see it now at the bottom here, MacMost Videos and there's nothing in there.
So let's go to MacMost here and go to Video Archive. Let's pick a video here and let's say let's add it to Bookmarks. We can go to Bookmarks, Add Bookmark, or just Command D. When I hit Command D it will prompt me for it to Save it. I want to save it in MacMost Videos. Then I'll Add. Let's say we do that for a bunch of different videos here. Command D and you can see it remembers the last place I saved it. So I can add that one. Command D and save that one.
Notice that I can alter the title before I save it. So I can kind of shorten it or something like that. Now when I look under Bookmarks I can see I've got a bunch of different ones saved in here. Now it would be nice to be able to go back and review these. Maybe add notes. Maybe have some that stand out. There are different ways to do it. They are kind of tricks. They're not really built in there and they're not obvious.
So let's go to Edit Bookmarks and we can see the folder there. I've got it opened up so I can see these. There's some different things that I can do. I, of course, can edit the title here. If I select it, don't click so quickly that I'm double clicking but click a second time. You can see I can edit. I can do that same thing here. So I can change the name. So what can you do with changing the name? Well, you can do things like add characters at the beginning. It doesn't really effect the real page. It's just the name of your bookmark. So you can say, put you know an exclamation point next to something you want to checkout. Option 8 gives a nice little dot. You can even use emoji. So I can do Command Control Space and it brings up Emoji Viewer and I can search for cool little things like a checkmark and add that in. Maybe I can use a heart for one I really like. That kind of thing. Now not only are they here in this list but when I actually go to Bookmarks I can see them here. So you can see how it makes certain ones standout. 
Now there is also a way to add notes to these. So the way you want to do that is you want to go to the Show Bookmarks view which will put them here on the left. Then you can see the folder here. Double click on the folder and it opens it up in this more detailed view here. It actually even puts little thumbnails there of what each page kind of represents graphically. So you might be able to see a little bit more. You can see here that you can click on them to jump to any of these pages. 
But you can also Control click here and you can see in addition to renaming and editing address, which we can do in the Edit Bookmark screen, we can Edit Description. The description is taken from the description built into the page. But I can customize it here. So I can put anything I want in here. I can put my own notes having to do with this page. So imagine if you're researching something and you have a whole bunch of articles in your Bookmarks folder, you can actually add notes. You want to keep them small. Just a couple lines here. But you can add notes for each bookmark of maybe what part of your report this is important to or what to look for in this article. That kind of thing. It's not obvious that you can add these notes and there's really no other place you can see them except for here in the sidebar. You have to, counterintuitively, kind of double-click this folder to then go in and have this view of your bookmarks inside the folder.
You can also create subfolders. So I can go back up here and I can select MacMost Videos. Just click it once. Don't double-click it to go in there. You can see it just opens and closes if you want to do that. Now I go to Bookmarks and Add Bookmark Folder and it will add a new folder on the outside. So I can, say if I wanted to create a folder for System Preferences, so a video that had to do with System Preferences, I can then move that inside here. You can see it drops down, there's a hierarchy to it, and I could drag videos into that. So I can create this hierarchy of folders and subfolders to organize Bookmarks if I'm preparing a bunch of things for some research or I just want to categorize something like videos at MacMost and create a  nice set of videos that I can go back and refer to later on.

Comments: 6 Responses to “Creative Ways To Use Safari Bookmarks”

George Rubin

8 years ago

Is there a simple way to alphabetize?

Gary Rosenzweig

George: No, no simple way to alphabetize them.

Adrian Hayes

Thanks Gary - as usual helpful and informative. I used to be able to move Folders around to reorder them in Bookmarks by simply dragging them, but this now seems to result in the Folder I am trying to move disappearing inside an adjacent one. Is there any way to reorder them or has this now been designed out?

Adrian: It still works. You have to be careful when you drag them and watch where the dot at the left end of the blue line extends. If it indents under a folder, you are playing it inside the folder. If it is more even with the left side of the folder, then you are placing it at the same level, just after the folder. As you drag, look at that line and don't release until you get it right.

Don

Thanks for that! Seems like this will help keep bookmarks a little more organized/meaningful.

Samuel Corchado

I found this very interesting and useful. thanks again for all your insights!!

Comments Closed.

Creative Ways To Use Safari Bookmarks

Comments: 6 Responses to “Creative Ways To Use Safari Bookmarks”

Welcome to MacMost

Free Weekly Newsletter

MacMost Online Courses

Keyboard Shortcuts PDF

Connect with MacMost

MacMost Sections

Popular Tutorials

Information