Migrating Your Bookmarks Between Browsers

What is Migrate?

Bookdog's Migrate command copies all of the bookmarks from browser/service to another.  Although this can be done with using move or copy between Main Windows, it requires several different drag/drops with different selections in order to get the Bookmarks Bar contents into the Bookmarks Bar, Menu to Menu, etc.

Bookdog's Migrate Bookmarks feature handles the tedium, and also allows you to specify what is to be done with existing bookmarks, if any resulting duplicate pairs should be eliminated, and if so, how.

How to Migrate Bookmarks

To migrate your bookmarks, in the File menu, click New Migration.  This item will be enabled if you have more than one browser/service available in your Macintosh account.  In the Migration Document which appears, your source and destination brower/service, and then choose from among the available options.  A unilateral migration will only affect the bookmarks of the browser selected on the left, but a bilateral migration will affect bookmarks of both browsers.

Saving Migrate Settings as a Migration Document

The settings in the Migrate window may be saved as a document for future use, using the Save, Save As and Open items in the File menu.

Automatically Migrating (AppleScript and Automator)

Migrations may be run and scheduled using AppleScript and, if you have Mac OS 10.4 or later, Apple's Automator.  Bookdog must be licensed in order for the "save" command in the scripts to execute without error.

For those who are not familiar with Automator, we have simple instructions for setting up a daily bilateral synchronization between two browsers, so that bookmarks you add in one browser will be available in the other.  Once you start poking around in Automator, you'll probably find cool actions in other applications which you can use to set up more workflows.

Bookdog's Automator actions are built in AppleScript, and if you'd rather write your own scripts, check out Bookdog's dictionary in Script Editor, and download our sample AppleScripts.  (These are basically the same scripts that we use in the Automator actions, with a few added comments and cosmetic embellishments.)

Special Circumstances and How They Affect Migrate

Bilateral Migration

When a bilateral migration is executed: firstly, bookmarks not in the right-side browser are copied from the left, and secondly, bookmarks not in the left-side browser are copied from the right. In both cases, bookmarks are merged (no bookmarks are deleted), duplicate pairs are avoided by not copying bookmarks that are duplicated by an already-existing bookmark with the same URL, and empty folders are not copied.  Separators (separator lines) are not copied from the source; existing separators in the destination remain.  These conditions have been selected to give minimal disruption of the existing bookmarks documents, and so that bilateral migrations can be repeated without multiplying any items.

If you begin regularly performing bilateral migrations between browsers, realize that, if you want to delete a bookmark, you must delete it from all browsers, or else it will "come back" from another browser during the next bilateral migration.  To delete a bookmark in browsers that are being bilaterally migrated, you must delete it from all browsers.  To do this, in Bookdog click menu > Edit > Find. Then in the Find panel, check the browsers which might possibly have it (or "All"), type enough of the name (or, better, URL) of the bookmark you want to delete until they appear exclusively in the results, then Select All, right click (or control-click) on one of them to show the contextual menu, and click "Delete":

Items Not Allowed Or Would Be Weird in Corresponding Location

Some browsers do not allow some item types in some locations, so Bookdog will put things in the next most logical location where they are allowed.  For example, Camino allows you to put folders in its root ("Groups") level, but not "loose" bookmarks, so Bookdog moves such bookmarks into Bookmarks Menu  OmniWeb and Firefox 3 do not allow you to put anything in their root level.  For OmniWeb, Bookdog puts them into the Personal Bookmarks and for Firefox 3 into Unfiled Bookmarks.  Online bookmarks storage services do not allow folders at all, so Bookdog can make additional adjustments, as described in the next item.

Migrating Between Hierarchical and Tag Organizations

Bookdog can automatically make appropriate adjustments to folders and tags when you migrate items from a browser with Hierarchical Organization (like Safari) to a service which organizes uses Tag Organization (like Google Bookmarks™) instead.  To enable these adjustments, check Add parent folder names...as Tags, and/or Create folders...from Tags.

Duplicate Pairs of Bookmarks Created By Migrate

If you choose to MERGE bookmarks, and you have some bookmarks pointing to the same URL (same web page) in your source and destination, duplicate pairs of bookmarks may be created.  If you direct Bookdog to Avoid creating duplicate pairs, that means that Bookdog must either avoid copying bookmarks which are duplicates, or copy them and then delete the existing bookmark.  Although the URLs are equivalent, these bookmarks may have different names, folder locations and other attributes which are different. When you select which browser's bookmarks to "favor", you are telling Bookdog which one to delete when a duplicate pair is found and one must be deleted.  If you think that you want to keep some bookmarks from the other, you might NOT check Avoid creating duplicate bookmarks but later, fix them selectively, using the tools Analyze and Fix Duplicates.

Separators (Separator Lines)

Because separators do not have URLs, they cannot be recognized as duplicates, and therefore Avoid creating duplicate bookmarks does not affect them.  But you wouldn't want separators from both source and destination to be merged together.  Therefore, if you choose to MERGE bookmarks,

Deletion and Consolidation of Folders

Bookdog performs two actions as part of Migrate which may cause folders to be deleted:

Firefox "Live" RSS Bookmarks

Firefox stores two URLs for its "live" RSS bookmarks, the "regular" URL and the "feed" URL.  The feed URL is the useful one that supplies the RSS feeds.  Other browsers do not support "live" bookmarks and store only the regular URL.  Therefore, when you migrate a Firefox "Live" RSS bookmark to another browser, the feed URL is copied to the regular URL, and the bookmark becomes an RSS bookmark (but not a live bookmark).

The regular URL of a "live" bookmark is useless.  Indeed, when you create a new "live" bookmark in Firefox, the regular URL and the feed URL are the same.  (For some strange reason, however, Firefox 2.0 ships with a single "live" bookmark named Latest Headlines.  Its regular and feed URLs are different; the former points to Firefox' Live Bookmarks manual page, and the latter points to BBC World News Headlines.)

When MERGING, Bookdog's algorithm for recognizing duplicate pairs looks at both the feed URL and the regular URL to prevent creation of duplicates.

Properties Not Supported by All Browsers

Although all browsers support Name and URL, none of them support all of the other properties, and some of those which are supported are named differently in different browsers.  Selecting an item and clicking on menu > Selection > Inspector will show you what properties may be lost after migrating to a browser which does not support them.

Opera's Personal Bar

Opera's Personal Bar and Panel operate differently than the Bookmarks Bars or Toolbar in Safari, Camino and Firefox, which actually contain unique items (folders or bookmarks).  In Opera, the Personal Bar and the Panel contain only references to items which are actually in other collections.  In this regard, they are like the Smart Playlists in iTunes and Smart Albums in iPhoto, which contain only references to songs and photos which are actually elsewhere in your iTunes and iPhoto Libraries.

In Opera's Manage Bookmarks window, when you "Show Info" on an item and then check to box "Show on personal bar" or "Show in panel", you set a flag which tells Opera to do this.  The same checkboxes are also available in Bookdog's "Item Details" Panel.

In order to keep the same bookmarks between Opera's Personal Bar and the Bookmarks Bar of your other browsers, therefore, Bookdog therefore performs a couple tricks when migrating to or from Opera.

Migrating from other browsers to Opera.  Since by default Opera does not have a "Bookmarks Bar" folder, Bookdog creates a folder named "Bookmarks Bar", after first checking that such a folder has not already been created, either by you or as the result of a previous migration.  (Unlike the immoveable "Bookmarks Bars" which are required in Safari, Camino, and Firefox, you may rename or even delete this "Bookmarks Bar" if you don't like it.)  Bookdog puts all of the items from your other browser's Bookmarks Bar into this folder.  As far as Opera is concerned, however, this is just an ordinary folder.  In order for its contents to actually show in your Personal Bar therefore, Bookdog sets the "Show on personal bar" flag of each item copied from an "immediate child" of the source browser's Bookmarks Bar, unless the item is a Separator.  (By "immediate child", we mean that, for items that are folders, this flag will only be set for the folder itself, not on the items in the folder.)  All items so set will show in your Personal Bar.

Migrating to other browsers from Opera.  Any item that has its "Show on personal bar" flag set will be moved so that it is a child of the destination browser's Bookmarks Bar.

It's Undoable!

To restore the your destination's bookmarks to what you had before invoking Migrate, activate the destination's Main Window and click menu > Edit > Undo.  However, you must do so before you click Save, Revert, or Close on a Main Window.