wow – great tips and it all transferred to my iPhone, making it much easier to deal with.

Thanks. I had figured out much of what you wrote and implemented some of it. Your thinking was more complete than mine and I will implement most of your suggestions.

@Bob, thanks. You get the idea perfect, we are just trying to get people to start thinking in a certain way. Every user will have a unique case, and they can and are encouraged to modify to suit their needs. We are just trying to lay an idea framework, and see what everyone else comes up with.

Thank you, I really needed this. My bookmarks are a mess, even my folders need better organization.

I make HUGE use of the Bookmarks Bar.

I place folders there and then create sub-folders by relevancy in a hierarchical system which allows me access to hundreds of websites very quickly.

If a folder gets larger than what will appear on the screen without scrolling; I will create new sub-folders in that category so that I can quickly drill down to find the site I want.

I also use Auto-Click for opening in tabs, for example, my “Daily Read” which consists of 12 different IT related sites, of which “OS X Help” is one.

Safari is the best browser for me.

Cheers:
Bob

@WetcoastBob, thanks so much for your suggestions. That was the main point of this post. That while I have a certain method, everyone needs to develop their own that works for them.

You seem to have a solid solution that works great for you. Others can follow by my example, and also by WetcoastBob’s as well. Use bits and pieces until you get your browser working just how you want it.

http://www.sheepsystems.com/bookdog
‘Bookdog’ is the best.Alphabetizes, reviews,(on a schedule you determine) eliminates dups, also a friendly puppy you never have to feed or walk !

Help! How can I find out which folder I have stored certain bookmarks in? The find menu only takes me to the bookmark (and opens) it but doesn’t show me where it actually is. I have a lot of bookmarks I’ve placed somewhere and can only find them individually with this search. Spotlight does the same thing.
Thanks for any ideas.

@generosner, while you are in the search mode, there is a column called “parent”. This lists the name of the folder your bookmark is in.

I have a huge number of duplicates in my bookmarks. I believe these were caused by some flaw in sync services since the problem appeared after my fist attempt to sync Bookmarks using .mac. Any recommendation on how to resolve duplicated including multiple BookMarks Menu and BookMarks Bar folders? And now I have a Bookmarks Bar and a Bookmarks Menu Collection for more redundancy. What is that all about?

How do I delete Safari bookmarks?

@James, as far as I know, BookDog is the tool for you. I think you could use the demo to clean out what you need, and then not need it again. It does look like a pretty handy app though.

@Nathan, deleting bookmarks is covered in the post above. Just go to your bookmark manager, find the bookmark you want to delete, and press the delete key on your keyboard.

thanks,

The number 25 has appeared in my bookmark bar after the name of one of my folders – I have 143 bookmarks in the folder – the name on the bar reads- Design Blogs (25) – don’t know what its about – but its driving me crazy – any suggestions – by the by – does not appear in the name when I go to rename the folder in show all bookmarks – thanks

@maki, I believe you have added an RSS item to your bookmark bar, and that is showing you the unread count of new posts. I think if you look at this post on RSS in Safari, it may make some sense to you.

I can’t seem to nest folders (achieve a hierarchical structure). I highlight one folder, drag it to another, and nothing happens. What am I not doing? (I am able to change the folder order in the display.) Thanks for any help.

@Javier, perhaps try opening the folder, and putting it in the folder. I can only guess you are simply not being accurate enough when you drop the folder, so it ends up where you do not want, or ends up not moving.

If you could perhaps try to explain in as much detail as possible how you are trying this, and what the result is, I am sure someone here can help.

I added a bunch of bookmarks while doing an assignment. I finished and deleted all the bookmarks for the assignment. Now, my regular bookmarks are aligned to the left, no longer center. Is there any way to fix it? Thanks

@Al, I am not entirely sure I follow you with your question. Can you elaborate, as I have never seen bookmarks centered before. They are left justified in all the places that I have ever looked at a bookmark.

At the top of safari, underneath where the URL is entered, the bookmarks are listed

@Al, seems you are talking about the bookmarks bar, not the bookmarks menu. We have a pretty good walkthrough on the bookmarks bar.

I would start there. The only think I can think is you had your bookmarks bar set up in the past, in a way in which the first few items in it were empty items, giving it the appearance that they were right justified.

The bookmarks bar always works from left to right. Once you read the tutorial, let me know if it is still not clear, on how to edit, maintain, and manage it. If you still have issues, do not hesitate to fire off some more questions.

This a a problem I cannot figure out, and has asked alot of people, and they cannot figure it out either. Safari is my main browser on my mac. Some time ago, I am not sure what happened, but I must of hit just the right amount of buttons at once, and I lost my ability to edit my bookmarks.

Below the address bar, you have your single bookmarks and your bookmark folders. At the far left is a icon that looks like a open book. When you click on it normally, it opens the whole bookmark page where you can edit everything, reorganize, ect. Now, when I click on the open book icon, a gray bar appears at the bottom of the screen with a plus sign on the left. Nothing happens when I click on the plus sign.

What did I do?

@Jason, Hi. Sounds like you have some preference corruption. This should be pretty simple to solve. You will have to give up some of your saved data in Safari, but in most cases, that is not a huge deal. I would follow these steps, which should solve it, and give you a chance to backup most of your data and restore it.

1) Open Safari and go to your preferences, take screen shots, or write down how each pane in the preferences is set.

2) Go to the File menu, and down to Export Bookmarks, chose a location to export your bookmarks to, so we can import them later.

3) Quit Safari

4) In the Finder, go to your home folder, and open your Library folder. In the Library folder is a folder called Safari, open that, and move everything in there to the trash. You may be able to omit the deletion of a file called “Form Values” which is the file that remembers your name and other form values you have filled in on websites.

5) Now, also in your Library folder, is a folder called Preferences, you will fine a file in there called com.apple.Safari.plist, delete that file as well.

6) Jut for good measure, also in your Library folder is a folder called Icons, you can safely delete anything in that folder. The data in the files in there will be recreated next time you open Safari.

With those items in the trash, open Safari and you should be back to normal.

You can now go to the File menu, and re-import your bookmarks, and also go back to your preferences, and set those how you had them in the past.

Let me know how this works out for you.

That did the trick. Your a lifesaver. Thank you very much

Jason

You can organize your bookmarks with Advanced URL Catalog a bookmark manager compatible with Safari.

Hi, I’m looking for a bookmark manager for Mac that allows to add AND to visualize comments (key words, tags) added to a url. Url Manager Pro allows adding comments, but does not display them. Ideally I’d like to see sth like in iTunes or a database with various fields, where the tags or notes are just an extra field. Do you happen to know of such a program? thanks a lot
Michael

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Im having a big issue. My bookmarks are there. but when i go into the edit mode, to try and delete a bookmark. THE BOOKMARKS MENU IS EMPTY. Where are they? how can i get them to show up? I have every thing on “show” in the view menu. Still i cannot see my bookmarks to edit them. Only to go to them in the menu. They dont show up in edit mode. i need help.

@Shay, are you sure you are clicked on the “Bookmarks Menu” line item in the bookmark editor? Maybe make some screenshots and upload them to http://www.imgur.com/ so we can take a look.

http://imgur.com/dfkgv.jpg

http://imgur.com/59iup.jpg

the first one is showing all my bookmarks. the second is when i try to edit or delete bookmarks.. the entire menu is empty but only in the edit part. i can go to my bookmarks. but cant edit them cause theyre not there.. wtf? so why is the edit bookmarks blank? …thanks..

@Shay, are all your items on the left blank? So your Bookmarks bar, and bookmarks history are also missing? Sounds to me like a little corruption, I would just go to the “Export Bookmarks” menu, export them all, delete them all, and then import them in clean. You will also have a backup then as well.

bookmarks BAR and HISTORY are there. Only the MENU EDIT. is all missing. Maybe there is a button somewhere to get them to show? I have everything on “show bookmarks bar, menu bar, toolbar, status bar,”
i just dont understand. Everything works fine. I just cant edit my bookmarks. lol.

ok. I got it. lol. The problem was that I deleted ALL folders in Bookmarks column. If u see this image http://imgur.com/xtnqv.jpg
and the ones before.. I added a folder, with nothing in it, no webpage, nothing, and all the sudden all my bookmarks appeared. Its quite strange.. And just another bug thats in the safari 4 beta.. When is the release for the 4.0? Im still using beta, no updates on apple website either.

@Shay, nice trouble shooting. This was a hard one for me to help you with. If I can not replicate it here, then a lot of it is guesswork. You were running the Windows Safari, and I do not have access to that platform at the moment.

Glad you figured it out.

As to when the next release will be out, Apple is pretty slow on that. We have the public beta, and I believe one update was pushed out the other day, check software update.

You can get the most up to date, in that you will have a version of WebKit that is up to date for that day. Containing the code that was built out within the last 24 hours. These are called the “nightly’s”.

Remember, this is just webkit that is the up to date part. WebKit is the underlying part of Safari that does the rendering of webpages. This can be nice to have, as you gain all this great CSS support, as well as a ton of new standards and bug fixes.

What it does not give you, is a updated Safari. So if there is a bug in Safari, like what you had, or say, the download manager was busted, or anything to do with Safari, you are not going to see those things solved in the nightly releases.

Nightly releases can be downloaded from here:
http://nightly.webkit.org/

You can run them side by side with the official release of Safari. It can be fun to play with.

Following this blog: http://webkit.org/blog/ is a good idea, you can get a good feel for some of the amazing things that are happening.

For example, check this out: http://webkit.org/blog/324/css-animation-2/ which while I do not think you will see it in the Safari 4 beta you use now, if you download the nightly, you will see all the greatness that CSS animation is going to one day bring to the web.

ok. thanks alot scott. take care.

My bookmarks have been insane. I realized that my readings (1000s of ebooks) have a structured system (5 folders). You reminded me to apply a similar simplicity and extensibility to my bookmarks!

This would be GREAT, except if I EVER go to the Bookmarks menu in Safari it immediately hangs, and I have to Force Quit. Did it in Safari 3, and now in Safari 4. Major annoyance!!! Tiger 10.4

@Florie, sounds like a permissions issue. I would start with opening your home folder, it is the folder with your name on it, in there is a folder called Library. Inside the Library folder, you will find a folder called “Safari”. Make sure Safari is not open, and move the “Safari” folder aforementioned to your desktop.

Open Safari, and see if your issues go away. If they do, you know the issue was one of pereferences in Safari. Quit Safari once more, and move back in “Form Values”, which is about the only file that deleting would cause you some trouble in that you would lose some data that Safari remembers for forms you have filled out in the past.

If you think you can get away with not caring about that, and all is working well, then just leave it as is, and you should be working again.

If that does not work, feel free to report back here and we can try a few other things.

dear Scott, you have no IDEA how happy you have made me! And that was so simple too. I’ve read all kinds of complicated stuff that ‘might’ work.

OH NO, my bookmarks aren’t there! I do happen to have a backup version of some sort …

Thank you!!!

@Florie, yes you would lose your bookmarks, as they were corrupted, which is what was causing you to have issues. Either that, or it was permissions of the files.

Be careful just putting the bookmark file back, as you may just bring back all your problems again.

The best thing to do, is to go to the File Menu in Safari, and select “import BookMarks, then go select your old Bookmarks.plist file in the Safari folder we put on the desktop.

This should bring them in clean. They may not all be in the right spot, and they may have changed the order in which they are shown, but that can always be managed in the bookmarks manager.

Well Scott before reading this, I just dragged the bookmarks file back into the folder, and everything is spiffy!

Scott, do you happen to know of an app (or applescript) that would browse through my bookmarks in Safari and identify those that are no longer valid. I find that this is an issue in the management of bookmarks as they are aging .

I found this free app: SafariBookmarkChecker but it’s not perfect (one would delete too many bookmarks if one follows it’s diagnosis)

@ Jaladuvar I just tried http://www.coriolis.ch/en/sbc/ which seems very old, but also seems to work fine. The concept of parsing the bookmark file and following the urls is not a hard one, so I believe the above url for that app is safe. It does make a backup of your bookmarks, and you can make one before you run it just to be safe.

I can think of a few manual ways to do it, but they are all a little ugly and take a lot of work. Give the download above a try, or search for something similar.

@Jaladuvar how so? All it is doing is checking the http status code. You should only delete those that register a 404, if you see a 403 moved permanent, or moved temporarily, that is up to you if you want to follow that moved bookmark location, and update to the new location. If you only delete the 404 marked ones, those are truly no longer the page you bookmarked.

Scott, thanks for your answer(s). I tested this app from Coriolis (funny it’s the only one). I agree that 404 means the actual page is no longer here, but sometimes it’s still my entry to a website I want to keep bookmarked. I’m just being lazy to edit the link to get back to the “root” of the web site. Thanks for your guidance on managing bookmarks.

Please i need some help i deleted a folder by mistake from my bookmark with lots of link that i use daily.

I am using Safari on a pc.. is there anyway to recover the bookmark folder??

tks

@Leo, do you have a backup of your files? If you do, resoring it should not be hard. May I suggest you look into xmarks which will backup your bookmarks to their system, and also allow you full synchronization amongst multiple machines.

I am afraid though, if you deleted a bookmark, or folder therein, that unless you have a backup, it is gone.

The file you are looking for is called bookmarks.plist and is located on WIndows in the Application Data\Apple Computer\Safari folder

thank you wil check Xmarks

Is there any way to add tags/comments/notes to a bookmark?
I know there is an app called Webnotehappy but is $25.!!!
Any FREE plugin/application availables?
Why didn’t Safari think about this.. is soo needed!

@Anniebananie you could always put some tagging identification words in the name of the bookmark. If you like Webnotehappy, I do not think that 25.00 is an unreasonable price to pay if it adds the features you need.

I am not aware of any way to tag a bookmark natively in Safari.

Hi there, i deleted my news bookmark in safari and bookmarks.plist hasn’t it anymore. how can i get the original news bookmark back? tks for your help

@Cesar, I believe this was covered in my reply on Restoring default bookmarks

@Hexley, Tks for your reply, i will try that

I have just started using Safari again after a couple of years of using another application. I imported all of my bookmarks and everything is working properly, except that when I save a bookmark now, it enters it at the bottom of the list instead at the top. This wouldn’t be an issue, accept that I have a VERY long list of bookmarks. According to the info above, it should put the new bookmark at the top of the list where it belongs. How can I correct this.

Thanks.

@Elliiot, looks like either we were mistaken, or behavior has changed, as indeed, bookmarks are added last in the list.

I can not find any way to alter this behavior. You may want to look at something like Xmarks for Safari which would allow you to load a web page with all your bookmarks, and I imagine you could sort them as well, though you may want to check first.

How can I find a subfolder, other than opening every bookmark folder and looking into it?
When I type anything into the Safari search window, it gives me all the individual bookmarks that match, but not the subfolders that match. I’d like to know the parent folder that contains the subfolder I’m looking for.

@nick When you do your search, at the top of the results list is a column header name, one is called “parent”, which will tell you the name of the parent folder that bookmark is in. This of course, probably only gets you the answer for bookmark folders that are one level deep.

For deeply nested folders, you can control-click on the bookmark in your found set, and select “show in collection”, which should take you to an expanded list of where that bookmark lives.

If you are adding a bookmark, and want to be able to stick it into a sub folder somewhere, I usually press command-D to add the bookmark, click on the menu list, and just start typing the name of the subfolder. OS X will generally take me right to from the list.

Depending on how you have your tabbing preferences set in the System Preferences, you may actually be able to tab to the list of bookmarks, instead of manually selecting the list with your mouse.

I do try to limit myself to just one subfolder. Anything more than that, and I find I am being to granular in my thinking, and will spend more time on bookmark organization, than on just stuffing it into a single folder, and leaving it there, to never book looked at again anyway

Thanks.

Also, my “never looked at again” folder is called “temp,” unfortunately.

wow! drag them onto the desktop to alphabetize….it worked!!!!! been driving me crazy..thanks

Is there a way to always display the bookmarks on the side (like I do with Internet Explorer), rather than always having to open up the bookmarks book?

@Diane I am not aware of any way to keep the bookmakrs bar open at all times. Maybe you can use the bookmarks toolbar more often, that is able to be enabled to always be shown.

I personally do not spend a lot of time in bookmarks, so I rarely have needs for this. As long as a bookmark is made, and I can remember a few bits of it, I just hit command-L and start typing, Safari usually will be able to figure out the url I need pretty quickly.

A year or two ago my Safari bookmarks changed from a list to a page split between a list (bottom of page) and an awful attempt at an image, surrounded by black (top of page). Is there a way to revert to the old interface with no image on top? I’d be really grateful to anyone who can tell me!

@Nicole,
Yes, this is pretty simple to solve. When you are in your bookmark screen, and you are looking at the upper lower split screen view, you should notice three horizontal thin lines.

Grab those, and slide that split window up, all the way to the top. You should be able to get it to go away entirely, aside from the search box, which still is handy to have.

You can take a look at a screenshot I made that shows how to restore your bookmarks to a list from the new split screen mode.

Adding a bookmark to the list if one has subfolders too it’s very confusing since the horizontal distance between folders and subfolders is too short to distinguish ones from the others.
Since it’s a narrow list anyway it would be nice to increase this distance, thanks, p.-

Hi,
Can anyone tell me how to completely delete the Bookmarks Menu? It saves everything I started bookmarking from when I first got my computer, and they are no longer of use. Also I don’t like to have the history of pages displayed. I would like to keep my other bookmarks in tact, however. This is a very annoying problem with Safari OSX!

Thanks!

@Christy
You can not delete the Bookmarks menu. You can clear everything in it by going to your bookmarks editor, and deleting every bookmark in it though. The menu at the top of your screen that says “Bookmarks” is there to stay though. I do not think you can alter those menu’s is any application, Safari or other.

If you want the history of pages to stop, go to Safari Preferences and set history removal to one day.

Be careful what you delete, if you want to maintain some bookmarks, but not others.

Thank you!
Unfortunate that there is no other way to clear out the bookmarks menu without going through everything else, but thanks anyway for letting me know how to go about it.

@Christy
I did try my best to sort of fill in the blanks to help you with what I thought was a fair answer to your questions. To be honest, I am not entirely sure I fully understand the scope of what your end goal is.

Maybe you can explain in as much detail as possible, what it is that you are trying to do. I find there is almost always a solution.

I am working on getting forums installed. There do not seem to be any Mac forums of what I would call “high quality”; I want to solve that. Forums all have too many categories, you immediately hit a wall of “where in the heck to I even ask my question”. God forbid, you break the rules of the forum.

I can install any of the free and open forums, which are nice, but also means I am forever updating them to make sure they are secure, and all my users data is safe. Or, I can look to a paid forum system, where security and updates are still a problem, but less so. Until I find the funds to secure a copy of the forum software I need, comments here will have to suffice.

OS X Help essentially covers the hosting fees, which is nice, but at 4 to 7 hours per post… from research, typing, proofing, screenshots, meta and description tags, possible video editing etc, we are not getting rich Forums are high on our list, they will happen, and open us to have more time to let the community help the users, while I can concentrate on the actual site contents.

I try to email a reply to everyone to let them know there is an answer waiting for them. So if you do not mind, try this:

1. What is your specific problem?
2. What have you tried to solve it?
3. Why is this a problem?
4. Are you sure you are not simply misunderstanding a core fundamental of how the application works, and in
5. reality there is no problem?
6. What is the behavior you see now?
7. What is the expected behavior from your point of view?

The more data you can give us, the better we can come to an answer, the less back and forth clutter in the comments, and the faster we can come to a solution to your issue. Assuming there is a solution.

I do hope we can help you get where you want to be. please let us know what you think about the above six issues, and feel free to add more if you see it suitable.

I’ve been glad to see so much good advice here, and hope you can help me with my problem. I was clearing out old files, and accidentally trashed all of my bookmarks. I caught the error before I emptied the trash, but now I have many bookmarks which appear, when seen in their place in the Bookmarks folder (or in the Trash), to have names that are long strings of letters and numbers. When I look at them in the Safari bookmark menu, they have the name of the web page. Is there any way, other than bringing them up one at a time, that I can see their actual page information? I’m trying to get rid of a lot of them, but can’t tell what’s what with alphabet soup as names. If there’s a way to see what’s what, I can reorganize them. Or is there a way to bring them back into Safari and then organize them? Right now they’re all in one folder together. Thanks for all your great help!

Dave

@Dave
I have been considering your question for a few days now. I so far, do not entirely understand. I am assuming you are using Safari.

In Safari, when you delete a bookmark, it is gone, there is really no way to recover from that bookmark deletion. Yet you state that you were able to retrieve them from the trash.

I tried a few different ways, and I can not get a bookmark to go into my trash. I can drag a bookmark from Safari’s bookmarks menu, into the OS X trash can, the bookmark will be deleted, but nothing shows up in the trash can.

Perhaps you can take some screenshots of your scenario so I can see what it is you are referring to? http://imgur.com/ is a good place to upload images to for showing to others.

If you could also explain in as much detail as possible how you got to where you are, I think we can figure this out.

Do you have backups? Perhaps we can just restore your bookmarks file back to a state when it was more manageable for you?

Scott,

Thanks for your response. I used a program called Tidy Up to locate duplicate files and other files that I knew I wanted to trash. Then I decided to locate and toss cache files. In the process, I noticed LOTS of files that had the kind “Web internet location”; these are what I assumed were bookmarks. (I’ve uploaded a sample snapshot at ( http://imgur.com/8bXTE.png ) There were many duplicates, since I had backed up my computer several times to a huge remote drive, and I decided to clear out a lot of space at once. However, I overdid it, and tossed them all. They did wind up in the trash; they did show up there. I retrieved a bunch of them, but now they’re all in one folder. The problem, as I mentioned, is that some have names like s9378j3897r9nchjf974966e7jdgk07538h; when they are opened with Safari, they show their true identities, but doing that one by one would take years! Anyway, I hope that’s a bit clearer. Any suggestions would be welcome!

Dave

@Dave, nothing against Tidy Up,but there are often applications that aim to solve problems that I tend to think are not really problems.

It seems to be your computer was disorganized in your opinion, so you wanted to solve that. I am afraid to say, there is no easy way to do so, and any application that reports that it will is reporting falsely. Certainly, these applications can help, but you need to know and understand your computer, how it works, etc, in such a way, it nearly makes the need for the application moot. If you know that much about your computer already, you probably are not in this untidy condition to begin with.

One of these days I will write an article on cache files. In general, cache files are good, you want them, then speed things up. It is far faster for an application to locate data out of an optimized cache file, than to fetch that data randomly from disc or the network. Deleting cache files is something that can help if you are experiencing problems, but should not be part of regular maintenance, it is counterproductive. They were designed for a reason, to circumvent that is generally not a good idea. ( I am being largely simplistic in that explanation, so I hope the more advanced users here do not take me too literally )

I think you have a few options. One is to restore your bookmarks from an older backup,which you mention you have. Quit Safari and look in /Users/YourUsername/Library/Safari/Bookmarks.plist. That one file stores all of your bookmarks. Just locate that file on your backup prior to your use of Tidy Up, replace the file you currently have, after making a backup of that file of course, and you should be right where you left off.

Second option, would be AppleScript. You will take all of the bookmarks that are of an ill named format, open them all at once. This will take some time, and slow your machine down to a crawl. Once they are all open, you would run an applescript that bookmarks all open windows. I would get on any of the AppleScript forums and explain your problems, someone can help you craft a script that will solve your problem. It should not be too much, and only take a 15 or 20 line applescript.

You probably could avoid opening all the bookmarks, and just tell AppleScript to look at a folder, open one item, bookmark it, delete the file, and move on to the next. http://macscripter.net/ is a good resource for AppleScript.

hexley,

I like the idea of an AppleScript solution, but I haven’t used AppleScript. (The last programming I did was with HyperCard, back in the ’80′s!) In its defense, TidyUp is GREAT for removing duplicate image files, even if the names are different, as well as finding certain types of files (by size, type, etc.) with more than one search term to narrow the search. This time was a slip-up. However, I appreciate the suggestions on renaming files. I’ll see if my backup is workable, too.

Dave

@Dave,
I think my issues with TidyUp is that it will find dupes, but the way Mac OS X is moving, dupes are part of how it is supposed to work. Take for example, your iPhoto Library. An import will import one copy of your photos. It will also generate thumbnails, and if you edit any aspect of a photo, it is going to make a copy of it.

The only way I would feel safe that TidyUp found a duplicate file would be if it used a checksum of the file to compare. If those were duplicate, then I could feel safe to delete one of them.

At any rate, for me, the cases of duplicates would be rare. Though I do have perhaps 10′s of thousands of files called index.php or index.html. Unless it uses checksums on those, I would want to preserve those duplicates. And even then, the chances I have identical index.html or index.php files that are identical, yet part of a project and need to be there, are high.

Projects in general are an area where duplicate are part of the nature of working on a computer. You may have Client XYZ and be working on mockup A, mockup B, and mockup C, all of which have Client_XYZ_logo.gif in triplicate for each mockup. I like to keep projects as self contained entities, so if I pack one up, it has all the parts related to it. Removing two of those duplicate locos would indeed get rid of two redundant files. In this case, I believe the redundancy aids in organization though, and does not in fact stifle it.

I am a bit curious how you end up with so many duplicate files that you need a tool to manage them, what is it that you do as your career/work that gets you in this position?

The AppleScript should not be too hard, as long as your needs are simple, and you very well may be able to hump your way along in Automator to make it all work. Depending on how complicated you want this to be, is going to depend on how complex the AppleScript or Automator action becomes.

If we kept it to say, a folder of .webloc files, all of which you wanted to open one, bookmark that location, then move that one file elsewhere, then repeat the process, that should not be too hard.

This script does 100% of what you want it to do except the bookmark aspect:
http://macscripter.net/viewtopic.php?pid=100479

If you look at that, and look at the section where it says:
print document 1 without print dialog

Delete that line, and insert in applescript that will make a bookmark. If you want to cheat and just get it done with, use AppleScript to mimic pressing the keys on your keyboard, which would be something like this:

tell application “Safari”
key code xxx — Command D
key code 36 — Return
end tell
end tell

Save the file as an application, and drop your .webloc files on it, one at a time, it will open them, wait for each to load, press command-D and save the bookmark to the last bookmark location you set, and move on to the next.

Scott,
Thanks MUCH for taking the time to reply and give suggestions. I teach, and over the years I’ve moved the entire contents of my computer to each newer computer, since the memory has increased geometrically with each one. The result has been copies and copies of copies. Since TidyUp _does_ check for identical resource and data forks, it will only identify those that are truly, exactly the same. I have often cleared needed space by looking for files that were duplicates but only greater in size than a given minimum, so that I could clear space quickly. I recognize the validity of your argument regarding those applications that create a duplicate in order to work. Fortunately, TidyUp also allows the choosing of only volumes or folders that should be searched, so the system folder and other needed caches can be avoided. (As I said, I just went a bit overboard this last time, when I tossed my bookmarks!) Anyway, thanks again for your help!

Dave

Apple should fix this real pronto. Having the option to alphabetize Safari bookmarks, as any other browser does, should be standard. How come nobody at Apple have think about it.

Thank you for all your organization tips. I have a question: How can a move all my bookmarks and files on bookmark title ( at the left side of the bookmark manager). I move everything there selecting all my bookmark from bookmark menu and now it doesn’t allow me to move them back selecting all of them. It seem like the only way is moving one by one, but I have hundreds and I don’t want to do that. Thank you

@Victoria
I really despise the ability to add bookmakrs to the sidebar you refer to. They are in an area that most bookmark syncing applications can’t read, are hard to get to, and don’t show in any menu items.

And, as you have noticed, you can’t select more than one item at a time. Sorry I don’t have a better answer, but I was unable to figure a simple way to move those items in batch.

If you have an old backup of your Safari Bookmarks file, you could restore that, or there is a chance you could open FireFox, as it to import your Safari bookmarks, do some management of those bookmarks in FireFox, and then import them back into Safari.

The first web page of any session is EXTREMELY slow to load. Why. I’m using the latest version of Safari on 10.4.11

Hey on my iPod it automatically goes to my subfolders and won’t let me access any of my other folders and I can’t find any videos or sites to help

@Victoria may have eluded to my issue or question but let me restate it in case it is different. Under Bookmarks/Show All Bookmarks, I see a list of bookmarks in the middle of the page. This list contains many but not all of my bookmark folders. I also see a list of bookmarks in the left column titled ‘BOOKMARKS’ which contain all my bookmark folders. What is the difference between the two lists and how do I manage bookmarks in just one of these locations? Thanks!!

Correction: the list of bookmarks in the middle of the page is the listing from the “Bookmarks Menu”, on the left hand side. Still, it differs from the list on that same left sidebar further down, titled “BOOKMARKS”. Thanks…

It was a good tip on making a daily/weekly temp folder.

I was doing somewhat a similar task using text edit, title it for a purpose of research, leave it run open on the desktop to slide address off onto it.

This way I could also add related data/image to the list.

So I will make a TEMP folder as suggested and manage it.
Thanks
Phil
Mpls Mn

PS/
There are a few handicap’s using Safari bookmarks compared to MicroSoft.
MicroSoft bookmarks are permanent as a saved document folder, where as Safari a plist is fragile and can vaporize.

There’s no way to color the parent folder in Safari to speed through all the open folders.
For massive lists, best I’ve discovered is placing a star in front of parent folder

Alphabetize,
Apple needs an app to set a preference in Bookmarks to do this.
Cheers

I’ve used Firefox for so long, but I’m trying to love Safari. Why is it though that the bookmarks “manager” shows all the bookmarks I have added, yet the bookmarks “menu” does not display everything? It’s confusing as hell.

Scott, I was having problems with Safari hanging if I chose the drop-down menu “Show All Bookmarks” and you told me to throw away my Safari preferences and that worked. I do that periodically now.

My new Safari problem is slow-loading of my home page when I open Safari (it’s Google, but it’s anything else if I do that first). Somehow I discovered that if I get rid of my History and then restart Safari, all is well. Are the two problems somehow related?

Also, I’m having the ol’ “mac-boot” thing again. Can you direct me to an answer on that? You know, the blank grey screen, the whirring fan, the little message in the upper left corner … Oh, and the huge noise announcing all this will be happening.

can you add the printer to the Safari Bookmarks Bar??

Today Safari started displaying bookmarks in a non-list format. I don’t even know what it’s called, the pages like an iPhone, I think, but it gives me motion sickness and I absolutely cannot use it. There seems to be no way to go to list format, let alone default back to this. This is the sort of “improvement” that makes some people happy but is deal-breaking for others. Can you help? Thank you!

Don’t know what an URI is…
my comment is this. I need more help than you can imagine. I am so lost with managing info that I don’t even bother. The bookmarks are useless to me. I can’t make a new folder because there is no option to do so. I can’t even understand your site, I need a primer for really stupid people. Its too damn complicated! Is a bookmark the same as a folder? Why does this have to be so complicated?

I’m hoping you can help me with bookmarks and folders on my Apple I-Pad. I’m trying to organize my bookmarks into folders. I can create a folder but I can’t figure out how to get the bookmark into folder. Do I have to start all over, go to each site then rebook mark it?

My bookmarks menu is not working at all. Help!

I came here because I couldn’t figure it out. What a crappy way to manage favorites. In windows this does not require a technical article this size. Maybe Apple can one day make use of RMB?

Thanks for input. My bookmarks are suddenly only showing as cover flow which is totally impractical. I need them as lists. I’m searched everywhere to change this but am completely stuck & annoyed. Tks for your help.

Anything I look up in history automatically goes into my bookmarks. How do I stop this.

After upgrading to Lion and iCloud the other USERS’ bookmarks on my MAC are now showing up on all of our bookmarks! Now my daughter’s favorite teen sites and my wife’s cooking sites are all mixed in with mine! What did I do wrong and how can I fix it with out all of us loosing our sites?

@Joel,

Are you syncing more than one iPod, iPad, or iPhone on the same account? Each users device will need their own account our bookmarks, mail, calendar items, and more will traverse down from the cloud on each device to the Mac, as well as to each others devices.

I have an iPHONE which is on my account. I have my user space, my daughter has hers with a different login on the same computer as does my wife. No other iPods or iPhones.

I’m new at all this so really need simple instructions. How do you delete a bookmark? Thanks

@Lynn, deleting bookmarks is covered in the article on this page as well as clarified in a number of the follow-up comments.

If you press command-F on your keyboard it will bring up a “find” entry field labeled “search”. You can type “delete” in there which will in turn highlight all the times “delete” is mentioned on this page.

From there you can scroll through the results or press command -G to jump to the next occurance of the word you are searching for.

@Joel. While we haven’t decided how to deal with this site moving forward, it has always been a Snow -Leopard based questions site. 

I think we may move to a yearly paid model where for a very small fee you get one on one email support for any problems within reason. 

I’ll try to answer your question in a limited form, but don’t want to confuse our users, none of whom have Lion yet. 

If I had to guess, do all the accounts share the same AppleID? This is the email/username/password you enter in to buy music, apps, books, movies, etc?

Since you mentioned “daughter” I’m assuming she is younger and probably doesn’t have a credit card. Because all Apple services need a credit card, AppleID account sharing can be common. 

Due to the record and movie companies restrictions on who can download what and how many times to each computer, the AppleID is the “key” to managing this. 

By using the same AppleID even on different user login accounts, what has happened to you will happen to others. 

Prior to iCloud this didn’t matter, but now there needs to be a way to distinguish one users purchases from another. Using the same AppleID appears to their system as if it’s the same person regardless of the number of user accounts and devices. 

To resolve it, I would start by disabling the cloud features in System Prefs on every user account. This should stop any further mixing of data.  Now you need to set up AppleID’s for each user. They probably can share the same credit card, but must use a unique email address and password. 

Hopefully, the bookmarks and other data are accurate somewhere. Maybe on the Mac, maybe on the mobile device, or if not, from a backup somewhere that you can restore. 

Somehow, you need to get a new AppleID for each user account and get the data back to how it was. This may mean doing the cleaning manually, which could be a pain, but will probably go faster than you might expect. 

Now, from within iTunes, look into the other accounts and de-authorize the initial AppleID accounts that are cussing pollution to each other. 

With that done, each account has a user account and an AppleID that are connected to each other but are distinctly their own. 

Turn back on the cloud featutres, and a sync should mirror your local data back up to the cloud and you are all set. 

So here’s the one downside, and it’s big. If your daughter bought games, music, movies, etc under your AppleID, she no longer has the permissions to use that media any longer. 

You, being the AppleID account holder under which all items were purchased, own all that media. You and only you have a license to use that media.  You are more than welcome to share it with her, just not outside of your account. 

This means re-buying everything for the other accounts, or playing a dance where you disable cloud, login with your AppleID on the other accounts, use the media you desire, when done, log-out, and log back in with the correct Apple-ID, and go about your day. 

Prior to the cloud you could authorize multiple machines. This can no longer work for the very reasons you are learning. 

A huge hassle. 

Apple has been known to delete an account of all purchases and allow you to re-download in special cases. But I believe you still have to remember what to download. This may be easier now that iTunes lists all past purchases in the purchase history. They aren’t obligated to, generally being as nice as possible when you talk to them goes a long way. 

That’s my suspician. If you have under 50.00 of purchases, I would probably write it off as a loss and re-download/buy again in the correct account. 

If its more, I would call Apple support and ask them if there is anything they can do. The number is 1-800-SOS-APPL

– Scott

Thank you so much for writing all that, I appreciate it very much. And it actually makes sense of a very complicated, confusing and frustrating issue, so good job there. You even explained problems that I haven’t even discovered yet, so at least I will understand why things are happening when they do crop up. It obviously goes a lot deeper than just my bookmarks. Thanks again for shining a thorough light on what is happening. Sorry about mixing LIONs and SNOW LEOPARDs, I didn’t know it was version specific.

@Joel, keep in mind there’s also a chance Apple has an undocumented method to fix this. They often do but won’t publicly announce it to avoid abuse.

It’s impossible Apple wasn’t aware this would be an issue. What you were doing is common. Most users never think about how user account segregation works. Nor should they have to. Apple simply shouldn’t have allowed account sharing of this nature, though at the time, I suspect they had no idea about the cloud and the user backlash would have been huge.

Instead the opted for a generous 5 authorizations per iTunes user. They fought hard for this with the record labels. But now with apps and the idea whether an app purchase has the license to be shared amongst others it’s more strict. Should a 60.00 GPS app be able to be authorized on an entire families Apple devices? Some may think yes, but in the real world you would be buying multiple GPS devices, one for each car.

It will take some time to straighten this all out. There still currently isn’t a way to even demo am app. You buy it, try it, hate it, and own it. This is unlike how software purchases have ever been, and I’m sure will change once the systems are in place to accomofate such trial versions.

I would still call Apple and explain your scenario. They can be rather generous and helpful when things that clearly weren’t intentionally your fault happen. Maybe they will toss you a gift card for the amount of your purchases. It’s not unheard of. But there’s no steadfast rule. It depends on the person you talk to and if there is any wiggle room in the policy.

If you have AppleCare or any device is under 12 months old, call in about that device. They will spend as many hours on the phone with you as it takes. Apple has been rated best customer service for years on end; it’s worth try.

( This was typed on a mobile device; please be gentle when critiquing my spelling and grammar. )

The purpose of the USER in our family was to separate our stuff and our computer lives, not to share in the consumable items. I don’t want my daughter to have access to family financial information and my business documents. While in an “ideal” world where money was no object, I would love to buy everyone their own suite of computer equipment and software, I can’t. Apple’s solution of USERS was a perfect solution for creating a simple architecture of privacy and order. Apple has always been a family friendly company. I don’t care about the purchases of songs and what not. I just want the order and privacy, and not to look at my bookmarks for my bank site and fish through twenty Justin Bieber fan sites to do it.

@Joel, you did the right thing by segregating accounts. It’s what it’s designed for, and did exactly what you wanted, keeping Bieber on his side if the fence.

If you’re ok with some loss of apps you should be fine. Since music sync has not been rolled out into iCloud as of yet, you won’t have any music collisions.

As long as you can find a clean backup, you are in good shape. If not, unless you have 1000′s of bookmarks, it shouldn’t be too hard to manually delete those Britany Soears tracks of your daughters account and keep them safe on yours.

Good luck.