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visualize bookmarks

If you have been an active Internet user for at least a year or two, you may have lots of bookmarks accumulated in your browser bookmark menu. If so, it may take you quite some time to find the page you remember saving. The frequent joke I hear is that it really is easier to find something on Google than in your browser bookmarks, and if you've been browsing and bookmarking pages for years, you are likely to have a hard time even recognizing the entries you find in your bookmarks menu.

Hopefully, the following two browser extensions, for Firefox and Google Chrome, will partially solve the issue. They will capture the page preview for each of your bookmark entries to let you easier recognize it and have more fun browsing through them.

Visualize Bookmarks In Firefox

ViewMarks [No Longer Available] offers an alternative way to organize and use your bookmarks. Immediately after installing it, you'll see default thumbnails around the place and you'll have to click through to your pages to capture the thumbnail. But for all new bookmarks, the preview images will be automatically captured and saved. The thumbnails in any folder can be rearranged using simple drag-and-drop functionality.

The page interface also allows you to:

  1. Easily resize the thumbnails;
  2. Quickly jump to higher-level folders using the breadcrumb-like navigation;
  3. Easily search within your bookmarks:
Visualize Bookmarks

Besides the thumbnail, the tool saves other information about the page such as its meta description, meta keywords, when it was saved and how many times you have accessed the page. This information is visible on hover-over:

visual bookmarks

The great thing about ViewMarks search is that it includes all this additionally captured information and therefore allows you to search not only within your bookmark titles but also within the page description and keywords. This enhances your search capabilities quite a bit and helps a lot if you have accumulated hundreds of bookmarks already.

Both the thumbnail image and the additional information can be edited: just right-click on any image and select "Edit":

visual bookmarks

The little handy "Save" icon below the image allows you to upload any image and create the thumbnail using the local file.

visual bookmarks

All in all, the tool makes a great job helping to figure out your bookmarks, especially if you've been bookmarking for several years and have a hard time remembering most of your bookmarks.

Visualize Bookmarks In Chrome

As compared to the above addon, Visual Bookmarks is somewhat limited and sometimes slow but that's the only option so far for Google Chrome users.

The extension visualizes your browser bookmark folder structure, captures the thumbnail image and shows the page title in the foreground. It also supports Delicious bookmarks and has a built-in search option.

visual bookmarking

It doesn't have drag and drop functionality that could help re-arrange the bookmarks. Besides, per my observations, it only generates the page preview image if you click through the link right from the extension window (if you just bookmark the page, it will appear as a gray box with the title):

visualize bookmarks

To conclude, the tool does a good job creating a good visual structure of your bookmarks as well as giving you quick access to them, but it will give no help in organizing and re-arranging your bookmarks (unlike the similar Firefox addon we have seen above).

Are you aware of any other useful browser extensions to visualize and organize your bookmarks? Please share them in the comments.