Importing bookmarks and link lists

Why it asks for permission

Reading your bookmarks needs your browser's permission, and Latr asks for it from the import card at the moment you use it rather than at install time.

That is deliberate. As a required permission it would put read and change your bookmarks on the install dialog — the most alarming string the browser had to offer, shown before anyone had seen a single screen, for a feature most people never open, on a product whose pitch is that nothing leaves your device.

If you never import, Latr never has it. You can revoke it afterwards from your browser's extension settings and everything else keeps working.

Importing a bookmark folder

Settings → Your Data → import bookmarks. Pick a folder, and Latr shows you a preview: which links it found, what time each would land on, and how many there are.

Nothing is created until you confirm. That matters more than it sounds — bookmark folders are usually larger than people remember, and finding out by generating two hundred reminders would be a bad afternoon.

Spreading them out

You choose how far apart they land. Two hundred reminders all firing at 9am on Monday is not a reading list, it is a denial of service on your own attention.

Spacings that work in practice:

• One a day for a genuine backlog of long reads
• Three a week for a course or a series you want to get through
• All at once, at a weekend hour if you would rather triage the pile in one sitting

The preview shows the first and last date before you commit, so an unreasonable spacing is visible as an unreasonable end date.

Pasting a list from anywhere

You do not need bookmarks at all. Paste raw text into the same card and Latr picks out anything link-shaped: a reading list, a Todoist export, a column from a spreadsheet, an email full of links.

This route needs no permission of any kind, because you are handing over the text yourself. If you only have one pile to import, it is often less trouble than granting bookmark access at all.

Undoing an import

Every import is stamped as one batch, so removing it is a single action rather than deleting two hundred reminders by hand.

Related: tags and folders for sorting what arrives, and per-site rules if one site dominates your list.