Amazing way to Remove Duplicate Bookmarks: Fast Bookmark Scanner

I am just wowed and appreciative of this great Chrome Extension built by Nordine Zetoutou of Chenove, France. Fast Bookmark Scanner has made my Bookmarks usable again. (Disclosure: I make no money from this post.There is no additional purpose or benefit other than sincere appreciation and sharing info on a great app!)

Duplicate Bookmark Creation

I know I am not alone in having duplicate bookmark issues! Many of us who heavily use search frequently have to switch default browsers between Google Chrome, Safari, and Firefox because one or the other develops issues. Currently Safari is seriously hanging and recently it deleted my History (Sigh!). Then when I am at work I often have to use Microsoft Edge. So in short, I have ended up with Bookmarks in many different browsers.

When you try to collate or organize them via exporting and importing (even when using third party apps) you end up with duplicates: duplicate links, duplicate folders, duplicates of duplicates, etc.

Bookmark Manager Software

To keep this post short, I am not going to go into everything I tried to manage bookmarks over the years. But it has been an ongoing issue for me. Two that I tried and do NOT recommend are:

• X-Marks: Though I love LastPass for saving passwords, their X-Mark product is buggy as all get out! It slows down your browser horribly. Removing duplicates and organizing is laborious! And after a couple hours of work, it deleted everything I had done! Google reviews of X-Marks and you will see that is has not improved.
• TagPacker is an interesting site for finding articles but absolutely lousy at organizing your bookmarks. That said, I think there are better sites for discovery and sharing.

How to Remove Duplicates & Organize Bookmarks

I am going to go through the steps I found that worked best for utilizing the power of Fast Bookmark Scanner

Step #1  Install Fast Bookmark Scanner

That is easy to do. No restart is necessary.

Step #2 (If necessary) Import bookmarks from all browsers

The idea here is to get ALL your bookmarks in one place. You can export the cleaned up version back to your other browsers or use some system to keep them synced. (Those systems would be a topic for another post if I get around to using one that works well!)

Tool Tip: How to Export your Bookmarks

Step #3 Collate your top level folders

The way Fast Bookmark Scanner works is that it can scan in three parent folders. So the next steps will be to get all your bookmarks into those parents so the app can find and remove all your duplicates.

What I found worked best was to then open Bookmarks/Bookmark Manager in Chrome.
Tool Tip regarding Bookmark Manager

Then move folders with the same name into the same parent folders. I did not take a photo of that but it essentially means putting all your Bookmarks Bar folders from the various imports into the Chrome Bookmarks Bar.Tool Tip /Hint to find top level duplicates

Make sure all the rest of your Imported bookmarks are in the Other Bookmarks section.

Step #4 Remove Duplicate Folders

• The steps of running it are to first run Scan Duplicate Folders

You will end up with a list like the image to the right.

• Click on Run all merging actions.

Poof! All your links are now in one of the folders and the others are empty.

Not to worry!

• Now run Scan Empty Folders.

Poof! All those empty folders have disappeared.

• You will want to run this for both Bookmarks Bar and for Other Bookmarks. (Mobile too if you have duplicates in there.)

Step #5 Remove Duplicate URLs

You will end up with results for URLs that are in the same folder and URLs that are not in the same folder. Deleting the ones in the same folder is as fast as clicking on the link. And it is why you went through the trouble of collating your folders in step #3 above.

But what about the URLs that are NOT in the same folder. Those the results take a little explaining.

First, the trash can will not show up until you Deselect the link you want to keep. Use caution there. I found it backwards from how I usually think.

Second, as you can see from this image, if there are a lot of duplicate links it may be because you have a duplicate folder. An easy way of getting rid of the duplicates could be as simple as finding the duplicate folder and deleting it.

Was this helpful?? Please let me know!!

I have no sense of whether I am alone or a rarity in how much of a mess my bookmarks became and/or if this post is helpful to people. I truly would like to know!

You can Leave a comment below. Or you can email me at viviloveith (use the symbol – you know which one! – then gmail dot com.)

If you found Nordine Zetoutou’s wonderful extension helpful, you can support her great work by donating at: https://www.paypal.me/nzetoutou/5 (I did!)