How To · June 30, 2016

bookmark in a book

Bookmark Organization Tips

If you’re anything like me, when you’re researching for class, you open tab after tab of websites and slowly work your way down the row. As I find things I like, I keep the tab open. If it’s not something I can use, I’ll close it so I don’t have to remember what was there.

After I have all of my tabs lined up, the question of what to do next comes up. Sometimes, I’ll narrow it down to one useful page. Other times, I’ll want to remember what I had opened. Here’s where bookmarks in Chrome can be really helpful.


The Bookmark Bar

The bookmark bar runs across the top of your browser right below the address bar. This holds direct links to webpages (or even little programs…more on those later) you want to save for later. You can rearrange the bookmarks by clicking and dragging on a title and moving it around. If you have too many bookmarks across the top, you’ll see an arrow on the right side of the bar that opens up an extended list.

Saving pages to the bookmark bar

There are a number of ways to save pages to the bookmark bar.

  1. Click the star icon on the right side of the address bar. This will add a bookmark to your browser.
  2. You can use the Control + D key combination (a hotkey) to save a page to your bookmarks bar.
  3. Click and drag the icon on the left side of the address bar to the bookmarks bar to save the page.

To delete a bookmark, you can either unclick the star if you’re on the page or right-click a link and choose “Delete.”

Bookmark Folders

The choices work well for single pages. Sometimes, though, you want to A) group things together by topic, or B) save everything that’s open so you can go back more thoroughly later. You can do both things easily in Chrome. To create folders, right click on some empty space in the bookmarks bar and select “Add Folder.” This will allow you to name the folder whatever you’d like. Clicking “Add” will drop the folder in your bar. You can now drag and drop individual bookmarks into the folder. The most powerful way to save a lot of bookmarks all at once is to use the hotkey Control + Shift + D. This opens a dialog which allows you to either select a folder which already exists or create a new folder which will hold links to every open tab in your browser. It keeps your bookmark bar from being too cluttered as you’re curating information to use in class.

One final tip…

If you don’t like seeing your bookmarks all the time (have you ever clicked on one when you didn’t want to?) you can hide them from view unless you’re in a new tab. Click on the Chrome Menu icon in the top right corner, go to Bookmarks -> Show Bookmarks Bar. Untoggling this option will hide the bar on everything except the New Tab page.

If that’s too many clicks, you can use the Control + Shift + B hotkey to show and hide the bookmarks bar without picking your hands up off the keyboard.

Work from anywhere

The kicker for Chrome is that if you’re logged into your account, Chrome will import all of your bookmarks from any other computer. If you start saving stuff at home and then open up Chrome at school the next morning, all of those bookmarks will update as soon as you log into your Google account. If you’re not sure if you’re logged in, click on the Chrome Menu at the top right of the page and click “Sign in to Chrome.”


What are your bookmarking habits like? Is there something we missed? Leave a comment below with your tips or questions.

 

The featured image in this post is a flickr photo by Captured Heart shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC) license.