MacMost Now 727: Safari Bookmarks Export Tricks

There are several ways to export bookmarks in Safari. You can use these techniques to archive old bookmarks and clean up your list in Safari. You can also create handy lists of links that can be stored elsewhere or uploaded to a web site.

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

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now. On today's episode let me show you how to export bookmarks from Safari.
So I'm on vacation today and I'm in Paris. One of the things I did before I got here was I searched data for information, recommendations, things like that and I saved them all to Bookmarks. This was great to have. Once I'm home I don't need to have those bookmarks right there and accessible in Safari. So I'm going to export them just to save them. You can do this several very useful ways. 
If I wanted to start a collection of Bookmarks so I could view them I go to Show All Bookmarks here or press that Bookmarks button. Let's create a new folder for Bookmarks, I'll call it simply Paris. Now I'll just start adding sites. So, I'll just create some sample sites here. For instance, a wikipedia page, and then I'll go ahead and add bookmark and I will add it to this new folder here. Then I will go and add a whole bunch more. 
So now I've added a bunch here. You notice when I did create this I created it in my Bookmarks Bar. So I've got them all easily accessible here which is something I may be doing if I had created them outside the bookmark bar simply in the Bookmarks Menu then they wouldn't be in the bar there they would be over here.
Either way, I can now get easy access to the list of cool links here. Now the idea is that I want to archive these. I am going to use that Export option and I'm going to archive these when I'm done with my trip or maybe I'm going on my trip but I'm not taking this computer with me and I just want to have access to this set of links. So I can select it and I can go ahead and then go to File and then Export Bookmarks. What it will do is that it will create this html file and I will call it Paris Bookmarks, and I will save it. Now I've got this html file here and when I look at it I see all my bookmarks that I have created including the list here under Paris. Everything is organized just as it is in my Bookmarks. 
Now the cool thing is that this is a regular html page. When I double click it will actually open up in Safari as a regular web page. I can also save this html file to a web server that I've got or some pseudo web server like say Dropbox File that I can access publicly. Then I can access it from any computer. It's a plain html file.
Now here is another cool thing that I can do. I can select not the folder but select everything in there just by selecting the first one and then shift selecting the last one or vice versa. When I have them all selected I can do Edit, Copy. Now I'm going to go to TextEdit and create a new document, a new rich text document, and paste it in and I get the links here in TextEdit. I can save this file out and it is basically a simple word processing file with active links. So it is a very easy handy thing again to put on a web site or Dropbox or put on a flash drive and carry with you. 
There is one more thing that you can do. From the Bookmarks list here drag this folder to the Finder and it will put a folder there and in that folder the list of web links, you can just double click on anyone and jump to it. 
So this technique is useful whether or not you are collecting bookmarks for a reason, like my vacation here, or whether you just collect them naturally and every once in a while you want to off-load them so you have an archive of them but you don't have them hanging around Safari all the time.
I hope you found this useful. This is Gary with MacMost Now.

Comments: 11 Responses to “MacMost Now 727: Safari Bookmarks Export Tricks”

Antrim

13 years ago

As usual, great info.

John255

12 years ago

Gary,
Terrific video. Thank you very much.
What I would like to learn is how to sort Bookmarks in alphabetical order, on desk Mac and especially on iPad Safari.
Thanks,
John

Gary Rosenzweig

No way to do that as far as I can tell. I guess the thinking is that it is so easy to search your bookmarks that there is no need to have them in a specific order.

Roger Rossman

Great Tip.. I travel too so this will be great for that.. Thanks.

Claire

I always learn sooooooo very much from you. Thank you

Drama

Great video as usual.

Only a question. I have my iPhone an iPad on the iCloud with sync bookmarks, but my iMac at home is Snow Leopard so I don't have iCloud there. Is ther any way to merge the bookmarks from the cloud with the ones in my iMac?

Thanks in advance!!

No, not if it is still using Snow Leopard.

Monitor Gold

How do I export bookmarks I use in Safari on my iphone to my windows 7 PC?

Depends on where you sync your iphone. If you sync to that same PC, then try syncing bookmarks (sync options in iTunes). Not sure of the options there exactly since it is Windows.

richard hrisch

Hi Gary,
How can I transfer all bookmarks from iMac to iPhone all at once?
Thank you.

The best way is not to "transfer" them at all. Instead, use iCloud to keep the bookmarks between the two in sync.

Comments Closed.

MacMost Now 727: Safari Bookmarks Export Tricks

Comments: 11 Responses to “MacMost Now 727: Safari Bookmarks Export Tricks”

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