Control Alt Achieve: Bookmark Folders in Google Chrome

Tuesday, December 13, 2022

Bookmark Folders in Google Chrome

This post is Day 6 of my "12 Days of Chrome-mas" where we are learning all about the Google Chrome browser including tips, tricks, lesser known features, and helpful ideas. You can access all of the posts in the series at: bit.ly/chromemas22

In a previous post we looked at one trick for managing your bookmarks, which was using bookmark icons. That is a great way to save space on the bookmark bar for your most commonly visited sites.

However, that probably won't solve all of your issues if you have dozens or hundreds of bookmarks.

Another helpful tip is to use bookmark folders. Let's take a look at how to create bookmark folders, how to add favorites to the folders, and how to search through all your bookmarks.

See below for a short tutorial video and written directions.

▶️ Tutorial Video (5 minutes)

Or watch on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UN1_foDO6T4

📁 Creating Bookmark Folders

So if you have a lot of bookmarks that fit into a category, one option for organizing them and saving space is to put them into a folder. For example, let's say I have bookmarks for a lot of Jamboard resources that I am going to use for a training session.

I could put all of these bookmarks into one folder called "Jamboard" for example. Here's how to do that.

First right-click on any empty spot on the bookmarks bar.
Then choose "Add folder…" from the pop-up menu.
This will open the "New folder" window.
Here we can type in the "Name" we want for our folder.
And then click "Save" when done.

This will put the new folder on our bookmarks bar.
We can click and drag the new folder around as needed to position it where we want on the bar.

➕ Adding Bookmarks to the Folder

Now that we have the folder, it is super easy to add bookmarks to it.

For our existing bookmarks, we can simply click and drag them to drop them into the folder.

And if we come across another resource that needs to get bookmarked in the same folder, instead of clicking the normal "Star" icon to bookmark it, an easier option is to:

Click once on the link in the address bar to select it.
Then click again and while holding down, drag the link right into the bookmarks folder where we want it.

🖱️ Using the Bookmarks Folder

Now we can just click on the folder anytime we want to access any of the bookmarks that are nicely organized inside of it.

However, in addition to opening just a single bookmark, we can actually open the entire folder all at once. For example, I may want to open all the Jamboard links when I am getting ready to start my training.

To do this simply right click on the folder and choose the option to "Open all".
All of the bookmarked links in the folder will open up, one per tab.

🔎 Searching Bookmarks

Even with all this organization, you may still get to the point that you have so many folders and so many bookmarks, that it is still difficult to find the one you need. Thankfully Chrome provides a built-in bookmark search.

An easy way to access this search is to do the following:

First click in the address bar at the top and type in the "@" symbol.
This will create a drop-down menu where you can select "Search Bookmarks".

Now just type in the word or words you want to search for.
The drop-down list will show you any of your bookmarks that match the search, for you to click on and open.