Bookmarks pile up quietly. A few a week for a few years and you have six hundred of them, a bookmarks bar that runs off the edge of the window, and a folder called “New folder (3)”. The good news is that the browser’s own tools go a long way. Here is a method that works in Chrome, Edge and Firefox, and then what to do when it is not enough.

Back up before you start

A clean-up involves a lot of deleting and dragging, and a backup costs ten seconds.

  • Chrome: open the bookmark manager with Ctrl+Shift+O (Cmd+Shift+O on a Mac), click the three-dot menu at the top right and choose Export bookmarks.
  • Edge: open favourites with Ctrl+Shift+O, open the … menu and choose Export favorites.
  • Firefox: open the Library with Ctrl+Shift+O, then Import and Backup, then Export Bookmarks to HTML.

You get one HTML file you can import again if anything goes wrong.

How to clean up a messy bookmarks bar

The bar is the most valuable space you have, because it is always on screen. Treat it that way.

  1. Keep only what you open weekly. Everything else moves into a folder - “Other bookmarks” in Chrome, “Other favorites” in Edge, the Bookmarks Menu in Firefox - where it is still one search away.
  2. Drop the names you do not need. In Chrome and Firefox you can edit a bookmark and clear its name, and the bar shows just the site’s icon. A dozen icons fit where three titles did.
  3. Use folders on the bar for sets, not for single pages. A “Daily” folder holding the six pages you check every morning is one click away, and right-clicking it gives you Open all.

If you would rather not see the bar at all while working, Ctrl+Shift+B (Cmd+Shift+B) shows and hides it in all three browsers.

Organise bookmarks by project, not by topic

Most messy bookmark collections are sorted by topic: “Design”, “Recipes”, “Programming”. Topic folders grow without limit and never finish, so they never get tidied.

Folders by project or purpose work better:

  • One folder per project or client, which you can archive or delete when the project ends.
  • One level deep where you can. Every extra level is a click, and folders inside folders are where bookmarks go to be forgotten.
  • An inbox. Let new bookmarks land unsorted, and file them in one sitting every week or two rather than deciding each time.
  • A “Reference” folder for the handful of pages you genuinely look things up in.

Firefox has one more tool here: tags. When you bookmark a page with the star, you can add tags, so one bookmark can be both “client-a” and “invoices” without living in two folders.

How to sort bookmarks alphabetically

  • Chrome: in the bookmark manager, open the folder you want, click the three-dot menu at the top right and choose Sort by name. It sorts the folder you are looking at.
  • Firefox: in the Library or the bookmarks sidebar, right-click a folder and choose Sort By Name.

Alphabetical is a good order for a reference folder and a bad one for the bar, where you want the pages you use most on the left.

How to find a website you bookmarked months ago

You will remember roughly what it was about and almost never what it was called. Search by the site name first, because page titles change and site names do not.

  • Chrome: the search box at the top of the bookmark manager searches titles and addresses. You can also type @bookmarks in the address bar, press Space, and search from there.
  • Edge: the search box on the favourites page does the same.
  • Firefox: type * and a space in the address bar to search only bookmarks, or use the Library’s search box.

If the bookmark search turns up nothing, try your history with Ctrl+H. You may remember roughly when you found the page better than what it was called, and history keeps visits for a long time.

Where the built-in bookmark managers run out

For a few hundred bookmarks, the steps above are a weekend afternoon and they hold up. The gaps show at the next stage.

  • No pictures. A list of titles is hard to scan when you are looking for “that page with the blue chart”.
  • No sense of what you never use. There is no way to see the bookmarks you saved and never opened again, which is often half of them.
  • No duplicate finder in Chrome or Firefox. The same page saved three times in three folders stays three times. (Edge’s favourites menu can remove duplicates.)
  • Chrome and Edge have no tags, so a page that belongs in two places has to pick one.
  • Many bookmarks are not bookmarks. “Read this later”, “check this on Friday”, “renew before March” are reminders that ended up in a folder, and a folder never tells you when.

One thing no tool can do without a cost: tell you which bookmarks are dead. Finding out means visiting every one of them in the background.

Organising bookmarks in Latr

Latr’s library works on your browser’s own bookmarks rather than a copy. Grant the optional bookmarks permission when you first open that section, and your real bookmarks tree appears in the library, fully editable:

  • Make folders, rename, move and delete, with undo on deletes. Edit a bookmark’s address. Paste a list of links and each becomes a bookmark.
  • Drag to arrange, or drop pages onto a folder to file them.
  • Search across every bookmark at once, not just the folder you are in.
  • Sort A to Z, by site, newest or oldest.
  • Colour folders, so the six you use most stand out in the sidebar.

Changes are made to the browser’s bookmarks themselves, so they show up in the browser’s own bookmarks bar and manager as well.

Bookmarks can also be shown as cards with a picture of the page, with a slider for card size. A bookmark gets its picture the next time you visit that page - it needs one more optional permission, and Latr never fetches pages in the background to make one. Until then a card shows the site’s letter on a colour. The visual bookmarks page has the detail.

Alongside your bookmarks, Latr keeps its own library of pages you save with Keep, which adds what the browser lacks: unlimited folders and subfolders, up to ten tags per page, a Never opened filter, a duplicates view that merges copies in one press, and the picture taken when you saved the page. You can import a bookmarks file into that library, too.

And for the bookmarks that were really reminders, give the page a time. It stops being a bookmark and becomes a reminder: at that time the page reopens on its own.

All of this is free, with no account, in Chrome, Edge and Firefox.

Start with the bar, then the inbox, then the folders - an hour a week for a month beats one heroic Sunday.