Pocket-Bookmarks docs

Install and set up

Pocket-Bookmarks is a browser extension. Everything you save is an ordinary bookmark in a “Read Later” folder, so your browser's own sync carries it to your other devices. There is no account to create.

Requirements

• A current version of Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge, or Firefox 140 or newer for the Firefox build.
• Safari is not supported, because Safari does not let extensions work with bookmarks.

Getting it

Pocket-Bookmarks is not in any store yet. Version 1.0.6 is packaged for the Chrome Web Store and Microsoft Edge Add-ons, and the store listings are pending. A tested Firefox build has not been submitted to Firefox Add-ons. To hear when you can install it, email us.

First run

1. After you install it, a Welcome to Pocket Bookmarks tab opens. Your bookmarks are untouched until you finish this step.
2. Choose where the “Read Later” folder lives: Other Bookmarks, which keeps your bookmarks bar clean, or Bookmarks Bar. You can move it later in Settings.
3. Click Create my Read Later folders. “Read Later” appears with Inbox, Reading, Favorites, Archive, Collections, and Imported inside. Collections starts with four empty folders: Business, Accounting, Coding, and Research.
4. The set-up page follows, with optional steps for saving, offline reading, bringing in your bookmarks, backups, and the side panel. Click Open my library when you are done. Settings › Help › Set-up guide › Show brings the page back.

To keep the toolbar button in view, pin Pocket Bookmarks from the Extensions puzzle piece in Chrome or Edge. In Firefox, right-click it in the Extensions menu and choose Pin to Toolbar.

Bring in the bookmarks you already have

The library is the “Read Later” folder, and the rest of your bookmarks stay where they are. On the set-up page, or in the empty Inbox under Your bookmarks are where they were, click Bring in. The button shows how many pages the library lacks, copies them into Imported › Browser Import with their folders, and then opens the library on them. To review them first, click Compare first… and use This browser's bookmarks › Compare… in Import.

Save pages

From the toolbar button

1. Click the Pocket-Bookmarks button in the toolbar, or press Alt+Shift+S (Option+Shift+S on a Mac). The Save Page form opens.
2. Check the Title and choose Save as: Bookmark saves the link only, Read Later also keeps the article for offline reading, and Both does both.
3. Pick a Folder (Inbox by default). Under Tags, delete any suggested #tags you do not want and add your own. Add a Note if you like.
4. Tick Keep a copy of this page to store a screenshot and a self-contained copy of the page on this device, for the day the site is gone.
5. Click Save.

If the page is already saved

The form shows Already saved and where, with three choices. Skip changes nothing. Update existing retitles the saved copy and moves it to the folder you picked; for a bookmark outside “Read Later”, it reads Update in place and leaves the bookmark where it is. Save another copy saves a second one.

From the right-click menu

Right-click a page and choose Save page to Read Later, or right-click a link and choose Save link to Read Later. Either one saves to Inbox at once, with suggested tags, and a page keeps its article once you have allowed offline reading. Pages already saved are skipped. The toolbar button flashes ✓ for saved, • for already there, and ✕ for a page that cannot be saved. A saved link is titled with its address, so rename it in the details panel.

Tabs and sessions

Click Save all tabs in the toolbar form, or right-click the toolbar button and choose Save all open tabs…. Pick a folder and click Save tabs; browser pages and pages you already saved are skipped. To reopen a session, right-click a folder and choose Open all in new tabs, or select bookmarks and click Open in the selection bar. More than fifteen tabs asks first.

The side panel

In Chrome and Edge, the side-panel button in the toolbar form, or Open side panel on the toolbar button's right-click menu, opens a compact view of Inbox, Reading, and Favorites, with search and a Save current page button. In Firefox, it lives in the sidebar: View › Sidebar › Pocket Bookmarks.

Hashtags and suggested tags

• Type #tag in any tag field or in a note, and it becomes a tag. A hashtag needs at least one letter, so #2024 stays plain text.
• Suggested tags come from the site's name, the page's own keywords, and tags you already use that appear in the title — five at most, worked out on your device.
• Saves from the toolbar form, the right-click menu, and the side panel get suggestions; imports and saved tabs do not. Turn them off in Settings › Saving › Auto-tag new saves.

Organize your library

Open the manager with Alt+Shift+M (Option+Shift+M on a Mac), the library button in the toolbar form, or Open bookmark manager on the toolbar button's right-click menu. Folders are on the left, your library is in the middle as a list or grid, and details for the selected bookmark are on the right. In a window narrower than 1,024 pixels the details become a drawer behind Details, and below 768 pixels the folders move behind Show folders.

Folders and reading status

• Inbox, Reading, and Archive are ordinary folders, and moving a bookmark into one sets its status. Opening a bookmark marks it as being read, and reading an article to the end marks it read.
• Favorites is a star, not a move: the bookmark stays in its folder, and the Favorites view gathers every starred one.
• New Folder under Collections adds a folder of your own. Right-click any folder for Rename, New Subfolder, Move…, Put in Order…, Open all in new tabs, Duplicate Structure, Export Folder…, and Delete. Deleting asks first and also offers Move Contents to Archive.

Select, move, and reorder

• Click to select, Shift-click for a range, and Ctrl-click (Cmd-click on a Mac) to add a row. With two or more selected, the selection bar offers Open, Move, Tags, Archive, Favorite, and Delete.
• Right-click a bookmark for the same actions, plus Open Original, Copy Link, Move Up, Move Down, Move to Top, and Move to Bottom.
• Drag bookmarks onto folders, folders into folders, and rows up or down; a blue line shows where they will land. Folder pickers with more than a dozen folders have a Filter folders… box.

Sort, and put a folder in order

The sort button changes only what you see — Manual order, Newest first, Oldest first, Title, or Domain — and each folder remembers its choice. Manual order is the browser's own order, and the only one you can drag or move rows in. To make an order stick:

1. Choose Put folder in order… from the sort menu, or Put in Order… from a folder's right-click menu.
2. Pick an Order (Newest, Oldest, Title, or Domain), and tick Also the folders inside to include subfolders.
3. Check the preview of how many items will move, and click Put in order.

The order then shows in the browser's own bookmark menu, on your other devices, and in exports. Folders come first, the app's own folders keep their places, and undo puts the old order back. It is not available in Favorites, which gathers bookmarks from many folders.

Split view

1. In a window at least 1,024 pixels wide, click Split in the toolbar. A second pane opens on the same folder.
2. Right-click any folder and choose Open in Other Pane to show it there. While only one pane is open, the item reads Open in Split View.
3. Drag bookmarks or folders across. Drop them between rows to place them there, or on the empty space below the last row to add them at the end. You can also press Shift+M, or choose Move to Other Pane from a row's menu.
4. To go back to one pane, click Split in the pane you want to keep.

Each pane has its own toolbar, search, sort, and selection, and a title line that walks back up its folder's path. The sidebar, details, and keyboard follow the pane you last clicked; its selection is blue and the other's is gray. Split view comes back the way you left it.

Tags and smart folders

• Add tags and Notes in the details panel. To tag many bookmarks at once, select them and click Tags.
• Settings › Data › Manage tags renames a tag everywhere, merges two by renaming one onto the other, or removes a tag from every bookmark.
• After a search, Save search keeps it in the sidebar as a smart folder that re-runs whenever you open it.

Clean up, and undo

• Find duplicates (Settings › Data) lists pages saved more than once. Keep the oldest or newest copy, or click Keep this on the one you want; the extras' tags and notes move to it.
• Remove empty folders (Settings › Data) names the folders first and never offers the app's own.
• If another device made its own “Read Later” folder before sync caught up, a banner offers to Merge it in, moving every bookmark and removing only the emptied folders.
• Saves, moves, deletes, archives, favorites, folder changes, imports, merges, reorders, and bulk tag changes can all be undone from the toast or with Ctrl+Z (⌘+Z on a Mac); press it again to go further back. Editing one bookmark's title, tags, or note is not on the undo list.

Read offline

Double-click a bookmark, press Enter, or click Reader in the details panel. A page saved with its article opens in the reader; anything else opens live in a new tab, as does Original.

The reader

• The toolbar has Smaller text, Larger text, a theme button that cycles through light, sepia, and dark, Highlights, Favorite, Archive, and Open original. Text size and theme are remembered.
• The reader reopens where you stopped, and reading to the end marks the article read.
• Images are stored with the article where the site allows it. Any image the site would not hand over stays a link, and needs a connection.

Highlights and notes

1. Select text and click one of the four colors: yellow, blue, green, or red.
2. Click a highlight to change its color or delete it, or to type a note and click Save note.
3. Click Highlights to list them all, jump to one, or Export them as a Markdown file.

Page copies

For a page saved with Keep a copy of this page, the camera button shows the stored copy. Switch between Screenshot and Page copy — the page copy is shown in a frame that runs nothing — or click Delete copy.

No offline copy

The reader shows No offline copy of this article for a page saved as a plain bookmark, or saved before you allowed offline reading. Open the page, click the toolbar button, choose Read Later, click Save, and then click Update existing. The reader's Extract now button tries the live page directly; if it says “Could not extract a readable article from this page”, use the toolbar route.

Search and shortcuts

Type in Search bookmarks… above the list. Search covers titles, addresses, tags, notes, highlights, and the text of saved articles, all on your device, and each result shows its folder.

Mix filters with ordinary words, and put quotes around a value with spaces, as in folder:"Deep work". Click Save search to keep a search as a smart folder.

Command palette and address bar

Press Ctrl+K (⌘+K on a Mac) to search bookmarks, jump to a folder, or run an action such as New bookmark, Save all open tabs, Undo last action, Import…, or Find duplicates. In the address bar, type pb, a space, and a few words: pick a suggestion to open it, or press Enter to open the library with that search.

Keyboard shortcuts

The first two work anywhere in the browser. The rest work in the library when you are not typing in a field. On a Mac, use ⌘ for Ctrl and Option for Alt.

In the grid, ← and → step one card, and ↑ and ↓ a row of cards. Only one row at a time takes Tab, so Tab moves past the list instead of through every bookmark.

Import, export, and backups

Import

1. Click Import at the bottom of the sidebar.
2. Drop a file on Drop a file here or click to choose: a Pocket, Instapaper, or Raindrop.io CSV export, a bookmarks HTML file from any browser, a CSV with a URL column, or a JSON backup. Or choose This browser's bookmarks › Compare…, or, in Chrome and Edge, The browser's Reading List › Import, which leaves the list itself unchanged.
3. In the preview, each entry is marked new, in your library, or elsewhere in this browser, and the All, New, Elsewhere, and In library buttons filter the table.
4. Check the Destination folder, and for pages already in your library choose Skip them or Import anyway.
5. Click Import. One undo takes the whole import back.

To compare with another browser, export its bookmarks as an HTML file there and drop the file here.

Export

Click Export at the bottom of the sidebar, or Export Folder… on a folder's menu. Choose JSON backup (everything, and restorable), CSV, Markdown (notes and highlights per article), or Bookmarks HTML (for any browser). CSV, Markdown, and Bookmarks HTML can cover a single folder; a JSON backup covers the whole library. Click Export and choose where to save the file.

Automatic backups

Backups are on from the start: weekly by default, saved without asking to a “Pocket Bookmarks” folder in your Downloads folder, with names such as backup-2026-09-24.json. The first comes a full interval after setup, a backup missed while the browser was closed runs the next time it starts, and the last five are kept. Change the schedule, or click Back up now, in Settings › Backups.

Restore

Drop a backup on Import and click Restore backup, or use Settings › Data › Restore…. A restore merges into “Read Later”: existing bookmarks stay, missing ones return, and tags, notes, and highlights are re-attached. Nothing is deleted, which also makes a restore the way to carry tags and notes to another computer.

Settings and privacy

Open Settings from the gear button in the sidebar or the toolbar form. It starts with your reading statistics and ends with Help.

Settings › Data also has Download backup, Restore…, Rebuild search index, Clear reader cache, Find duplicates, Remove empty folders, Manage tags, Clean up unused tags, and Remove data from deleted bookmarks. Page copies › Delete all removes every stored page copy.

Where your data lives

• Your bookmarks live in your browser's bookmark store. With browser sync on, your browser — not Pocket-Bookmarks — copies them to your own Google, Microsoft, or Mozilla account and on to your other devices.
• Tags, notes, highlights, offline articles, page copies, reading progress, smart folders, settings, and the undo history stay on this device, and do not sync.
• Nothing goes to us: there is no account, no analytics, and no server. The extension's only network request of its own is the optional site check, which sends each saved site's server one request a day, without cookies, for up to 25 sites a day. Each site sees your IP address, as it would on a visit.

Removing your data

• Deleting a bookmark keeps its notes, tags, highlights, article, and page copy on this device, so that undo can restore them. Settings › Data › Remove data from deleted bookmarks › Clean up… erases them for good, after saying how many are affected.
• Uninstalling removes all of the extension's data from this device. Your bookmarks and backup files stay; download a backup first to keep your notes and highlights.

For every detail, read the Pocket-Bookmarks privacy policy.

Troubleshooting and help

“Where are my bookmarks?”

The library shows only “Read Later”; your other bookmarks stay where they were. Bring copies in from the set-up page, the empty Inbox, or Import. See Install and set up.

Tags and notes are missing on another computer

Only the bookmarks sync. Download a backup on one computer and restore it on the other, as described in Import, export, and backups.

A page will not save

Only web pages, with addresses starting http or https, can be saved. For browser pages, extension pages, and local files, the form says This page can’t be bookmarked (browser-internal page).

An article has no offline copy

If you declined the permission, click Settings › Saving › Article extraction permission › Grant, then save the page again and choose Update existing. For a page with no readable article, keep a page copy instead.

Rows will not reorder

Dragging within the list, Alt+arrow moves, and the row menu's four Move entries work only in Manual order — not in a sorted folder, in Favorites, or in search results.

There is no Split button

Split view needs a window at least 1,024 pixels wide.

Remove empty folders offers my starter collections

Business, Accounting, Coding, and Research start empty on a new install, so they are offered. Undo brings them back.

A site is marked unreachable

A site is flagged only after failing on two different days. The check asks whether the site answers, not whether one page is still there. Check now in the details panel tests it again.

Search misses something

Use Settings › Data › Rebuild search index.

Firefox differences

The library also lives in the sidebar, at View › Sidebar › Pocket Bookmarks. Site icons are not shown, and there is no Reading List to import.

Getting help

Your version is shown at the bottom of Settings. For a question or a problem, email us, or use Contact support in Settings › Help. After a week of use and 25 saves, the library asks once for an honest rating on the store it came from; Later waits three months, and Don’t ask again is final.

Pocket is a trademark of Read It Later, Inc. Instapaper and Raindrop.io are trademarks of their respective owners. Pocket-Bookmarks is an independent product and is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of them.