Sorting Bookmarks In Safari

The new version of Safari allows you to sorts bookmarks inside of folders alphabetically. While a small feature, this is something many people ask about on a regular basis. You can sort by name or address.

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Video Transcript: So a lot of people are going to be happy about a tiny feature added to Safari with the latest Mac OS update. So if you have a Mac OS 10.13.4, which means you should have Safari 11.1, then you can now sort your Bookmarks alphabetically. 
The way to do this is not in the Bookmarks menu and it doesn't appear if you bring up the sidebar and show Bookmarks. But if you Control click on a folder you can see Sort By. You can sort by name and address. It also appears if you go to Edit Bookmarks and then you can Control click or right click on any folder there and select Sort By.
So, for instance, here I have a folder called Some Bookmarks. You can see they are not in alphabetical order. I can Control click, choose Sort By, then choose Name and you can see it reorders them. It's a permanent reordering. So now you should see this reflected even on your iOS devices. It should be in this order. 
You can also, as you saw there, Control click, Sort By, and then sort alphabetically by Address. In this case it's the same order. There  doesn't appear to be a way to sort the bookmarks that are just out in the open in the Bookmarks list. They need to be in a folder. But if you have a lot of bookmarks you probably organized them into folders anyway. 
You can Undo this though. So we look here to the order we've done under Edit, Undo you can see it adds it to the Undo list there. So I can undo the sort there by address and I can undo the sort by name to get it back. So if you want to try it out you can always fall back on the Undo to go back to your order as long as you do it right away, of course.
It seems like a really small thing and I don't use Bookmarks too much myself so it's not something that I'm too excited about but I know a lot of people who use Bookmarks extensively really wanted the ability to be able to alphabetize their bookmarks. I imagine a useful technique will be to create folders, move bookmarks to them, alphabetize everything in those folders and then maybe move them around from there. So there are probably going to be a variety of techniques that people can come up with to use this feature to get their bookmarks more organized.

Comments: 8 Responses to “Sorting Bookmarks In Safari”

José Couto

7 years ago

Hello, Gary Rosenzweig
Thanks for the tip.
This also works on OS X El Capitan Version 10.11.6 (15G20015).
I just did it.
Best
José Augusto Macedo do Couto
Porto
Portugal

Alison Gifford

Really useful.
Now can we have a way of sorting folders on the desktop!!

Gary Rosenzweig

Alison: You can do that. What is wrong with the way you can sort on the Desktop now?

dally messenger

I use bookmarks a lot - this will be very helpful to me

Hal Plimpton

Any similar way to sort reading list? Or organize into folders?

Hal: The reading list is meant to be a short list of temporary items. I would say that if you have enough of them and are holding on to them enough to want to organize, then you should be using bookmarks, not the reading list for those items.

Kathy

Very useful Gary, thanks!

Alice Faintich

This was extremely useful, thanks so much. Like Kathy though, I can't figure out how to alphabetize the actual folders.

Comments Closed.

Sorting Bookmarks In Safari

Comments: 8 Responses to “Sorting Bookmarks In Safari”

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