Using Bookmarks In Safari On a Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to use Bookmarks in Safari on your Mac.

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So your Bookmarks are basically a long organized list of webpages. When you're at a webpage and you think you might want to come back to it again, you can add a Bookmark to store it in your web browser and then easily return to that webpage at a later time. So, for instance, let's go to a website. I'll use my own as an example. Let's go to a specific page. Say you find this page has useful information and you want to return to it later on so you may want to bookmark it. Everything you need to use Bookmarks is here in the Bookmarks Menu. So you can go to Add a Bookmark or Command D to add this bookmark to your list of Bookmarks. You get to choose where to save this. So as I said before Bookmarks are an organized list. You can have folders and subfolders in there to organize your bookmarks. 

In this case we're starting off fresh and all I see here are Bookmarks and Favorites. We'll add this to Bookmarks. Now this is the title of the page. It's going to be there by default but notice how it is editable. I can change this to something else if I want to. I could also add a description although most people just leave that blank. But the description can include additional information to remind you why you bookmarked this page or maybe some information to help you navigate around in this page. Let's Add. Now if I go back to the Bookmarks Menu, remember I got to choose whether to add this to Bookmarks or to Favorites, I could see here at the bottom all of my bookmarks. There's a Favorites Folder and you can see there's a bunch of things in it. These are the default items that Apple puts in the Favorites Folder just so you have something in there to start with. Below that I could see other items, the things that are in the Bookmarks Folder and there's the one I just added.

Let's add another one by going to Wikipedia and let's do Command D to add that. I'll add that to Bookmarks as well. Now I can see under Bookmarks I've got these two bookmarks here. This list will just keep growing everytime I add something to Bookmarks. If instead I added it to Favorites it would appear here in this subfolder.

Now I can view Bookmarks in different places. I can view them here as we've seen. I can also choose Show Bookmarks. An easier way to do Show Bookmarks is to go to the View Menu and Show Bookmarks Sidebar. This has a keyboard shortcut. They both do the same thing. They bring up the sidebar here. Now you can see the same thing here that you see here. Although sometimes items that are hanging out here that are just in the Bookmarks Folder are actually in the folder called Bookmarks alongside of Favorites. But in this case they're shown separately like this. Now I have two ways to access these Bookmarks. Go to Bookmarks and then select the page like that or I can click here in the Sidebar and then access the page like that. 

In the Sidebar here I could also edit these. If I Control Click on any of them or right click on a mouse, two-finger click on a trackpad, I can access the ability to Rename, to Edit the actual address, I could also Delete here as well. Notice here I can add a new folder. So, for instance, I could create a new folder here to start organizing my bookmarks. Maybe I want to have a place where I store news articles. I can move one of these into that folder just by dragging and dropping. I could also drag and drop it out. Notice how I could also rearrange by dragging these. So I could move this one below there. I could move this folder above here. I could move folders inside of other folders by dragging one folder into another. I could click here to reveal the contents of a folder. I could drag things out of a folder like that for example. Drag it into another folder. Drag from one folder to another. I can do anything I really want to organize things. I could even Control Click on a folder here to Delete a folder itself.

Another interesting thing you could do in the Sidebar is if you double click on any folder, like let's double click on Favorites here, it brings up this view showing you the icon for the site and you see the site itself. Also you can see descriptions here. If I Control Click on it here I could edit the description. Remember before when we added a bookmark we had the chance to write our own description. You could also Search your bookmarks here by dragging down. You could see Search Bookmarks. If I Search like that you can see I come up with bookmarks that match that text. Once you have a lot of bookmarks it becomes easier to search sometimes than it does to remember where it is you put it. 

Now the ultimate way to view your bookmarks is not to use the Sidebar but to go to Bookmarks and then Edit Bookmarks. This takes you to a special screen here that gives you a very large view of all of your bookmarks. You can see the folders here and expand them like before. You can easily create a new folder with this button here. So I could create a folder like that. You can drag and drop like before. Folders inside of Folders. Bookmarks inside of Folders. Rearrange the bookmarks themselves. You could search for bookmarks right here. For any of these you can click on the name once to select and then again and you're editing. The same thing here. So it makes it really easy to edit names and URL's if you need to. You can also Control Click and get access to the same things in the Sidebar. There's Rename, Edit Address, Delete, New Folder.

So you can keep adding bookmarks and organizing them as much as you want. Create folders, create folders inside of folders. I'll move this Science folder inside of News Articles. Then you can move a bookmark inside of that subfolder. Notice in the Bookmark's Menu this is all reflected there. I see Favorites here. I see there's New Articles, there's Science, and there are the bookmarks that are stored in News Articles, Science.

Now a note about the Favorites Folder. The Favorites Folder is a special one. You can't Delete it! Notice with News Articles I can Control Click here and delete it. If I Control Click on Favorites I can't delete it. It's there permanently. You can't get rid of it. So Favorites is always going to be there. It's used in two special places. One is if you go to View and then Show Favorite's Bar. The Favorites Bar takes all the items from the Favorites Bookmarks Folder and it displays them here. You can leave that up there. If you want to go to any one of them you just click it. So at anytime I could jump from Wikipedia over to Apple over to any of these other ones. Now if you add a folder inside of Favorites, so I'll drag this into here. So now you can see I've got a folder in Favorites. Notice that it appears here and I can click on it and it actually reveals and lets me dig down to see the items inside. So the Favorites Bar seems like it could only contain a handful of bookmarks. But in fact using Folders you could put dozens or even hundreds of bookmarks in the Favorites Bar for easy access.

Another place you'll see Favorites is when you go to the Start Page. You may have the Start Page setup to be your default page. You can do that in Safari Preferences under General and you can have New Windows Open With the Start Page. New Tabs open with the Start Page. So you may see the Start Page a lot. Notice here it shows me Favorites here. I can click on this button here on the bottom right and I can Edit what's in the Start Page. So I can turn On or Off Favorites. As long as Favorites is On I should see it here and I have easy quick access to anything that's in my Favorites Folder and if it's a folder I can click once to dive down into it and keep diving down to get to the Bookmarks. So if you actually put all your bookmarks inside of Favorites you can access all your bookmarks from the Start Page. 

Another thing you can do with Bookmarks is you can open up a folder full of bookmarks as Tabs. So, for instance, here in the Favorites Bar if I go to News Articles, Science notice I've got three items here now. I can say Open All in Tabs and each one of those will open in a new tab. Now I also can use Tab Groups with this. So if I go to Bookmarks, Show Bookmarks Here, and let's go find that Science folder and you can see I've got three items in it. If I Control Click on it you could see I can Open In New Tabs or Open in a Tab Group. So I can create a new Tab Group that has those three things in it. So you can see now I've created that and even named the Tab Group after the folder. Notice here too whenever you see Open a New Tab if you hold the Option Key down it changes to Replace Tabs. So all the tabs you have open will be closed and these three items will be opened in their place. 

Another thing you could do is you could sort your bookmarks. So you could do that here in the Edit View. So you can select any folder. I'm going to Control Click here on Favorites, for instance. You could see Sort By. You could choose Name or Address. Or you could do it here in the Sidebar. Let's sort this Science folder here. I'll Control Click on it. Choose Sort By. Name. You could see it resorts them by name. You can't get it back to the original order once you sort it by name although if you just did it you could do Command Z to Undo.

Another place you're going to see Bookmarks is when you're typing here in the Address Field at the top. For instance, if I started typing something like this it's going to come-up with a top hit right here, maybe some suggestions, the ability to go right to a search. Also, Bookmarks and History. So instead of bringing up the Sidebar or going to Edit Bookmarks or even the Bookmarks Menu sometimes you could just start typing at the top and then find the bookmark that way. 

The problems people have with Bookmarks is when you keep adding them there are too many and they kind of become useless. Bookmarks are most useful when you have the important things there you can easily find them and get back to them. Once you have hundreds and hundreds of bookmarks then it's difficult to find anything or remember what you have bookmarked. So it's important to every once in a while to go through and maybe remove old bookmarks. Also, add new bookmarks sparingly. Remember anytime you go to a webpage you could go into your History and easily return to the webpage using your History. So you don't have to bookmark everything. If you want to go back to something later today you could just rely on your History to get back there instead of adding a bookmark. A bookmark is more useful when it's something that you know you're going to return to over and over again for years to come. Also, don't forget that if you found a webpage once you could probably find it again. You just Search for it and it will come up. So I often ask myself wouldn't be pretty easy to find this webpage if I wanted to? If the answer is Yes then I don't bother to add a bookmark. 

The one last thing I want to show you is that if you go to System Preferences and then your Apple ID and then you look at iCloud, Safari is one of the items here. You should have that checked. I turned it Off just to demonstrate using Bookmarks in this tutorial. But by default it should be turned On. In that case your Bookmarks sync across all your devices. So you're going to see the same bookmarks across your Macs, your iPhone, and your iPad. 

So there's an overview of using Bookmarks on your Mac. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.