Cleaning up Safari Bookmarks on iPad Mini and iPhone SE wrt iCloud

February 4, 2025 12:24 PM

My bookmarks are outta control. At a certain point a few years ago, somehow between my two devices and iCloud backup, I ended up with a ton of duplicates and I gave up, started anew and saved things to Favorites. The time has come to clean house!

This would be a lot easier on my laptop but sadly it is Windows 10. I have exported the bookmarks and favorites, printed them out…10 pages! I’ve made notes on the pages reorganizing and crossing out the duplicates so before I dive in, I want to make sure that iCloud will save this version and not keep old and new.

Editing Bookmarks and Favorites on my iPad is a real pain in the ass. I don’t even know where iCloud is or how to access it…

-Should I turn off syncing temporarily on iPad and iPhone? (Actually I don’t usually need bookmarks/favorites on my phone, I use my iPad for everything.)

-Can I get to iCloud via my Windows laptop? Is there some other way to edit Bookmarks other than dragging the link up or down the fly out list (Favorites is icons and those are easier to move.)

-But mainly I want iCloud to only keep this new configuration in case I need to backup someday. And needless to say, ELIA5.

posted by TWinbrook8 to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

You can sync them to a Windows machine, yes. After you've installed iCloud for Windows, see instructions from Apple for syncing bookmarks:

1. On your Windows computer, open iCloud for Windows.
2. To the right of Bookmarks, click the Arrow button, then turn on Bookmarks.
3. Click Install Extension next to each browser you want to use Bookmarks with, then follow the onscreen instructions.
4. Click Done.
5. Click Merge to share your current PC bookmarks data with iCloud.
6. Follow the onscreen instructions to download the browser add-on or extension.

I would do this in a browser that you don't have any bookmarks in right now; otherwise, it sounds like everything that was already there would sync with iCloud, too. If you don't have such a browser, you could set up a new profile in your existing browser. Do this before you follow Apple's instructions. The process for adding a profile varies a bit; here are instructions for Chrome, Edge, and Firefox.
posted by tubedogg at 1:13 PM on February 4

Can I get to iCloud via my Windows laptop?
You can also do that by going to icloud.com and signing in with your Apple id.
posted by soelo at 1:24 PM on February 4 [1 favorite]

I would also suggest looking into a bookmark manager, such as Raindrop.io. Their free tier is very nice, and you can send a bookmark to them from an PC browser and from the iOS share sheet. I keep some local bookmarks as well, all shareable via iCloud, but mostly just the ones I use everyday.
posted by lhauser at 5:00 PM on February 4