Combining and curating 16 years of bookmarks

September 18, 2021 10:36 AM

I have 16 years of bookmarks scattered across over 20 Firefox and Chrome browser export files. I would like to combine them, remove duplicates, delete dead links, and then organize them (and even tag them?). What is the easiest, most automated way to do this?

Right now the only thing I can think of is to pick a browser to import them all into, install extensions that will de-duplicate links and delete dead ones, and then manually sort and tag. Is there a better way?

posted by anonymous to Technology (5 answers total)

Import them into a website like pinboard.in. It's paid but super useful. It would auto-deduplicate, but you'd have to manually sort, tag and remove dead links. Going forward you'd be able to access them from all browsers
posted by kbuxton at 11:55 AM on September 18, 2021 [2 favorites]

Yup, Pinboard can import those files directly. It's a paid service, and there's an additional "archiving" service, which saves a copy, enables full-text search, and would let you see the broken links more readily. I'm a happy customer, though I've considered self-hosting something.
posted by Pronoiac at 5:42 PM on September 18, 2021 [2 favorites]

Just jumping into nth Pinboard. I have no connection to them (him) beyond being a subscriber. Here are my stats (I figure this addresses your point about dead links and organization):

Joined June 20, 2015, last active just now.
You have 4 958 bookmarks
3 public
2 775 private
2 180 unread
64 dead links
196 bookmarks have not been stored due to errors:
not found 64
bad request 3
forbidden 14
server error 95
unavailable 1

Also, I use the Firefox extension, plus the Android app.
posted by forthright at 6:07 PM on September 18, 2021

I haven't used it and cannot vouch for it, but there's a few Firefox extensions that purport to remove duplicates and prune dead links, like this one. The built-in bookmark manager can import bookmarks from an exported bookmarks file.
posted by Aleyn at 6:17 PM on September 18, 2021

I paid for Pinboard for a number of years. Generally worked well but no response to multiple emails when I had issues with my account. Personally I'd avoid and look for a different bookmarking system.
posted by chr at 1:46 AM on September 20, 2021