Using Safari Reading List

The Safari Reading List on Mac, iPhone and iPad is a better way to save a web page to read later than bookmarking. The page will be added to the left sidebar where you can easily return to it. Items sync across your devices using iCloud and you can also save them to read even when you are offline.

Check out Using Safari Reading List at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to use Safari's Reading List.
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So if you ever see articles online and you don't have time to read them now you can use Safari's Reading List feature to temporarily save an article so you can go back to it and read it later.
Alright. Say you find a page and you want to save it to your reading list. You can do so in several ways. One is to go up to the address bar. If I move my cursor over it you can see a little plus button there. I click that and it adds it to the reading list. You can see it there floating off to the left. You can also go to Bookmarks and Add to Reading List. You can see the shortcut is Shift, Command, D.
Now to view your reading list you click on the Show Sidebar button here. The Sidebar button is two modes. Bookmarks or Reading List. So click on Reading List to see your reading list. You can also go to View and Show or Hide Reading List Sidebar. Control, Command,2 to bring it up right away. Now here you see all the items you saved to your reading list. To view one you can just click it and it will bring it up here. Now once you've viewed it it's marked as read. So it will disappear from here but not right away. It will stay there while you're still viewing the page. But it will automatically be removed next time you return here it'll eventually go away.
For instance, if I were to close this Safari window here and open up a new window you can see now it's missing from the Reading List. But that doesn't mean it's gone. If I were to use my trackpad with two fingers or the mouse with two fingers and scroll down you can see there's some additional controls here. One of those controls is whether or not everything in your Reading List is listed to just unread articles. So the three unread ones are here. But if I go to All I see everything including articles that I've already read including that article that we were just looking at.
Now you can return this to the Unread state in a variety of ways. One is to Control click and you get some additional functionality here. For instance I can Mark as Unread. I can also, with two fingers on the trackpad, swipe from left to right and there's a Mark as Unread here. Swiping from right to left will actually give me the ability to instantly remove it so it doesn't go into Unread or All. It's gone completely. I can also Save Offline. Saving Offline is a really cool feature because it means it downloads the entire page and you can now access it when you're offline. So say if you're taking your MacBook on an airplane you can now read that on the airplane even if you have not connection.
There's even a feature in Safari Preferences, under Advanced, to Save articles for offline reading automatically. So then everything you then put in the Reading List will automatically have that turned on.
So on your iPhone or iPad you can add something to the Reading List by clicking on the Actions button on the bottom. It's the one with the box and the uparrow in it. One of the options there is Add to Reading List. So you can add a page to the Reading List. The first time you do that it's going to ask you if want to have Offline viewing turned on automatically. So we'll say sure. 
Now to view your Reading List you hit the Bookmarks button at the bottom and there are three tabs at the top. You can go between those to see Bookmarks, Reading List, and History. Reading List shows you the reading list. You have a button at the bottom to show Unread or show All. Go between those. You can tap Edit and then you can select some. With those that are selected you can use the Delete button at the bottom to get rid of them. You can also just swipe left to right to mark something as read or unread. Swipe right to left to Delete it. Of course just to view it just tap and it will load up the page.
So perhaps the best feature of Reading List is that it syncs using iCloud. So that means your reading list is the same on your Mac, on your iPhone, and on your iPad. You can add pages to it. You can remove pages. You can read pages and everything remains synced across all your devices.
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Comments: 7 Responses to “Using Safari Reading List”

Robert Finlay

4 years ago

Thanks for the reminder to use this feature especially the little + sign in the address bar. Forgive the off-topic question but what is that white strip device at the base of the monitor visible in many of your videos?

Gary Rosenzweig

Robert: An LED light strip. I use it to illuminate my face (under the bill of my cap) when shooting from the other direction.

Larrry

My wife and I share an iCloud account and we use the reading list to share articles with each other.

Hal Plimpton

Gary, I do use the Reading List on a regular basis. Have not yet found a way to organize the entries, but I can at least filter the listings by using the search window at the top of the listings, e.g. entering PHOTOS will only display entries relating to photos. Are you aware of any app that will organize the list content, e.g. into folders? POCKET was suggested but thus far have been unsuccessful. Any thoughts? Thanks...H

Hal: There's no organization like that. I guess the idea is they are only there for a short time anyway. If you need something more permanent, use bookmarks.

I find managing the reading list is a real pain and it seems to take up a lot of storage which surprises me as I would think all they are saving is the link to the page but that doesn’t seem to be the case?

Ed: Where do you see it takes up a lot of storage space? If you have it set to save offline, then naturally it will save text and images. But otherwise it is just a link and thumbnail. Either way, not much space.

Comments Closed.

Using Safari Reading List

Comments: 7 Responses to “Using Safari Reading List”

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