Bookmarks, Folders and Tags

The bookmark area is the oldest part of Bookmax and the one most accounts live in. On the left is the folder tree, in the middle the bookmarks of the folder you selected, on the right a box with search and tools. A bookmark holds a title, an address, a description, a favicon, a thumbnail of the page and any number of tags.

Saving the page you are on

Typing an address into a form is the slow way. The help page inside your account offers two links meant to be dragged onto your browser toolbar, next to the address bar: one called Bookmax, which simply opens your account, and one called Add.

Drag them there by holding the mouse button on the link, pulling it onto the toolbar and letting go. A right click and "Add to favorites" works as well in most browsers. From then on, whenever you are on a page worth keeping, a click on Add opens a small window with the title and the address already filled in. You pick a folder, add a description if you want one, and save. The favicon and the thumbnail are fetched afterwards without you doing anything.

The two links are not an extension and there is nothing to install. They are ordinary bookmarks in your own browser, which is why they work in every browser and on every computer you sign in from. The page about the Add link shows what the window looks like.

Folders

Folders are nested as deeply as you like, exactly like folders on a disk. Each one carries a name and, if you want, a colored icon, which makes a long tree much easier to read.

The header of the folder panel holds the three buttons that act on the selected folder: a plus to create one, a pencil to rename it or change its icon, a wastebasket to delete it. By default a folder has to be empty before it can be deleted, so move or delete its bookmarks first. If that gets in your way, the general settings have a switch that allows deleting a folder together with everything in it. It is off for a reason: what goes that way does not come back.

To rearrange the tree, take a folder by its icon and drag it. Up and down changes the position among its siblings, left and right changes the level, so pulling a folder to the right files it inside the one above. If you would rather have the tree in alphabetical order, the tools box has Sort Folders by Name, and the general settings can keep it that way permanently.

Working with the bookmarks themselves

The toolbar above the list carries the same three buttons: plus for a new bookmark, pencil to edit the selected one, wastebasket to delete the selection. Editing opens a form with title, address, description and tags.

Selecting works as it does everywhere in Bookmax: click into a free part of the row, not onto the link or the description, because clicking those opens the page or selects the text for copying. Drag over several rows, or use SHIFT and CTRL, to select more than one. A handle on the left edge of each row changes the order by dragging, and to move bookmarks into another folder you select them, take one of them by its icon and drop the bundle onto the folder name on the left.

Open selected in the toolbar opens a whole selection at once, each bookmark in its own tab. With nothing selected it asks first, because it then means the entire folder. It is the fastest way through a morning routine of eight sites, and browsers being what they are, it is also a good way to find out how many tabs yours will take.

Three ways to look at the list

The same folder can be shown as a compact list with the favicon of each site, as a big list with a thumbnail image of every page, or as rows of thumbnails with little text, which fits far more sites on the screen. Which one is right depends on the folder: names are faster to scan, pictures are easier to recognize. The page about the three views shows all of them.

Finding things again

The search field sits at the top of the tools box. Typing a word highlights it in the folder you are looking at. Submitting the search runs it across every folder and returns a result list that names, for each hit, the folder the bookmark is stored in, so one click takes you there.

Under the search, the Specials box keeps four standing lists that need no maintenance: the bookmarks you added last, the ones you opened last, the ones you open most often and the ones you open least. The last of those is an honest way to find out what a collection of ten years actually consists of. Premium accounts can also switch on favorites in the bookmark settings; a star then marks the entries that matter, and one click collects the starred bookmarks from all folders. Details are on the pages about the four lists and favorites.

Tools for a collection that has grown

The tools box holds the operations that work on many bookmarks at once:

Get Favicon fetches the small site icons for the selected bookmarks, for the cases where the automatic attempt failed or the site changed its icon.
Get Thumbnails does the same for the page images used by the big list and the thumbnail view. It takes a while, because every one of those pages has to be visited and rendered.
Find Duplicates lists the bookmarks stored twice and removes them on one button. After importing a browser export into an account that already had the same links, this is usually the first thing you want. Premium.
Find Outdated calls every address and reports the ones that no longer answer. A collection from 2009 will not enjoy this. Premium.

Import and export

Every browser can write its bookmarks into a standard HTML file, and Bookmax reads that file into the folder you select, with the folder structure intact. Importing is a Premium function. Exporting is not: every account, free or paid, can write the current folder, the folder including its subfolders, a team or the whole collection back out into such a file, and any browser will read it again. A folder can also be exported to Excel. The page about import and export goes through it in detail, and the settings area additionally offers a backup of the entire account in a single file.

Public folders

Your collection is private. If you want to show part of it, the bookmark settings have a public section: folders you move there appear on a page of your own under an address you choose, and everything else stays where it was. The page about public folders describes what a visitor gets to see.

Limits

A free account holds 100 folders and 1000 bookmarks, which is more than most collections ever reach. A Premium account has no limit, and unlocks the import, the duplicate check, the check for dead addresses and favorites. The full table stands in the account comparison.