Import Safari Bookmarks from folder?

[Doc69]

I had sync issues with my Safari bookmarks between my Mac, iPhone, and iPad. In order to fix it, since I have thousands of bookmarks, I dragged everything except Favorites out to a folder on my desktop. Now when I try to drag them back in, Safari will only let me do that with individual bookmarks, not with folders. Any idea how I can get those bookmarks back in Safari and keep the folder structure?

Also, if anyone knows of a great bookmarks manager, that would easily let me organize thousands of bookmarks in hundreds of folders, please let me know. Ideally, it would sync them outside Safari so that Apple's sync limitations can be avoided. Apple support told me Safari does not work properly with more than 500 bookmarks, and if you have that, it's also normal for bookmarks to be in a different order in your folders on macOS and iOS. This is happening to me and is quite annoying. Thanks!

 

[frou]

Safari has an official 1-click bookmarks export (File > Export > Bookmarks) that saves them all to a single .html file, that can later be imported (File > Import From > Bookmarks HTML File). If you have bookmark data in another form, at a push, I guess a script could be written to transform them into the same structure that that HTML file uses.

The bookmark ordering getting messed up by sync is definitely a recent bug https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...kmark-favorities-position-sync-issue.2338521/ and not a fundamental limitation of Safari, so it sounds like Apple Support are talking a bit of nonsense there.

 

[Doc69]

Safari has an official 1-click bookmarks export (File > Export > Bookmarks) that saves them all to a single .html file, that can later be imported (File > Import From > Bookmarks HTML File).

Thankfully, I did export my bookmarks before I delete them. However, I use Favorites for recent stuff and then a separate Bookmarks folder for everything else. So right now, the Favorites in Safari are the most recent ones whereas the Bookmarks folder has been deleted and is only in the backup. If I import the full backup, will it put everything in a separate folder or will the old Favorites overwrite or merge with the current ones?

 

[frou]

Not sure. I back mine up but can't remember the last time I actually imported them. My guess would be that it would merge.

If you can eyeball HTML/XML, you can probably open the HTML file in a plain text editor and just delete the whole Favourites section so that it's not even there to be imported.

 

[Doc69]

Not sure. I back mine up but can't remember the last time I actually imported them. My guess would be that it would merge.

I did the import and luckily everything went to a separate folder. No merging or overwriting. ? So now I can just move things where I want them and delete everything in the old favorites folder.