Control Alt Achieve: Icons and Emojis for Bookmarks in Chrome

Sunday, December 11, 2022

Icons and Emojis for Bookmarks in Chrome

This post is Day 5 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

Bookmarks are an excellent way to provide quick access to your most used websites. And that would be great if you only had ten favorite sites. However if you are anything like me, your bookmark collection is in the dozens, or perhaps hundreds of links.

So how do you manage your bookmarks when they no longer fit on the bookmarks bar?

Thankfully there are lots of tips and tricks to wrangling your bookmarks. One trick is to use bookmark icons.

See below for a short tutorial video and written directions on how this works.

▶️ Tutorial Video (4 minutes)

Or watch on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9L1zorjJqrQ

📧 Bookmark Icons

A big problem with bookmarks is, well, how big they are. Each bookmark takes up quite a lot of space on your favorites bar, so you are limited in how many you can see at one time.

When you look at it though, most of the space is taken up by the name of the website. However, many websites have very distinctive, clearly recognizable icons for the site. Just by looking at the icon we know which bookmark is for Gmail or Drive or Calendar or such.

So one trick I like to use for commonly accessed sites is to remove the text from the bookmark and just leave the site icon instead. Here's how to do that:

Start by right-clicking on an existing bookmark.
Then choose "Edit…" from the pop-up menu.
The "Edit bookmark" window will now open.
Here you can change a lot of things about the bookmark, but what we want to edit is the "Name".
Simply delete out all of the text in the "Name" box.
Then click "Save".

The bookmark is still there, but now it is just the icon for the website. This takes up much less room. You can get about five bookmarks in the space that just one bookmark used to take up.

😀 Bookmark Emojis

Now if you have multiple bookmarks that have the same site icon, this wouldn't work to remove all of the text for each, as they would look exactly the same.

In these cases, I remove the text and replace it with something as short as possible, such as a single letter, or better yet a descriptive emoji.

🏁 Conclusion

Hopefully these tips will help you to organize and access more of your favorite websites.

And hopefully you will bookmark Control Alt Achieve as one of those websites on your bookmarks bar so you can quickly get to all of the edtech resources I share there.

Be sure to check out the other blog posts and videos in my series on Google Chrome to pick up more tips and helpful ideas here bit.ly/chromemas22