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Level 1

79 points

Safari - hundreds of duplicate bookmarks

This seems like an old issue, but it only started happening to me with Safari 7.0 and Mavericks.

All of a sudden, I have hundreds, possibly thousands of duplicate bookmarks.

What is worse, the new window layout of Safari makes it impossible to delete. The "old" version showed bookmarks in a regular window. Individual items or groups of items could be selected.

Now, bookmarks are only shown in a sidebar. Only one can be selected at a time. While manually deleting hundreds or thousands or entries one by one seems tedious enough, it also isn't practical. When the bookmark sidebar is open, Safari all but freezes. Everything slows to a crawl, probably because there are so many bookmarks.

I saw some pre-Mavericks advice on resetting bookmarks, but that is a problem for me. I have many folders of bookmarks that I cannot lose.

Is there any way to

1. Clean up the bookmarks without losing them all (where is the bookmark file and can it be opened/edited in another application).

2. Stop this from happening again?

Thanks in advance.

Posted on Oct 30, 2013 12:24 PM

23 replies

MrElvey

Level 1

56 points

Feb 3, 2015 9:13 AM in response to MrElvey

Never mind. Xmarks is borked; it requires iSync to work properly, but iSync doesn't come with or run on recent versions of OS X.

May 28, 2015 6:05 AM in response to Texas Cats

Did PrairieFire give you a PERMANENT solution? There is no point me spending the money to buy the download if the problem simply re-occurs.

This is a nightmare problem for which I am desperate to find a permanent solution. Every time I manually clean up my BookmarksBar, multiple copies reappear within days. I cannot believe Apple has not provided a fix for this.

mgdenman

Level 1

5 points

Sep 14, 2015 12:40 PM in response to Joe M21

I had the same problem and found an easy solution. I highlighted all the duplicates, then went to file/cut and that deleted them.

Oct 8, 2016 6:04 PM in response to Joe M21

Drag all bookmarks from the folder over into excel. Sort and delete manually and then drag your list back into a new folder. You will have to reformat some of the website descriptions but will allow you to sort and eliminate the duplicates fairly quickly.

soccsam

Level 1

4 points

Jun 22, 2017 1:40 AM in response to Markie Mark Mark

You are brilliant, Mark. I now have time to solve world hunger! Sam

Aug 15, 2017 4:21 PM in response to soccsam

Thanks a lot Mark! I honestly have not seen another solution which works

alecf9

Level 1

8 points

Sep 21, 2017 1:36 AM in response to tygb

its not just bookmarks though. any changes, eg deleting individual items for reordering the list. all changes pop back again.

alecf9

Level 1

8 points

Sep 21, 2017 5:07 AM in response to alecf9

soz got to take back my take back, they are all back again!!!! how hard can it be to keep track of a list of bookmarks. icloud seems to handle contact details ok.

Safari - hundreds of duplicate bookmarks