After my big bookmarks move to the cloud (which I wrote about here) I found that my iPad suddenly had an old set of bookmarks. Of course this was at a bad time – on vacation when I needed to get into an accounting system for work, to make a change that would take five minutes, and the bookmark for that website was nowhere to be found.
I had almost everything – contacts, files, and bookmarks – online in the cloud where I could always get to it. Still, a small set of my most critical and private bookmarks were browser-based, which is frankly just simple and easy to use. Xmarks was working fine syncing across my computers and various browsers, but what about my mobile devices?
All my mobile devices are Apple except my Google Glass (and I’m not even going there). It used to be that iOS devices just synced to your Safari bookmarks driven by the same machine that you had iTunes on. I’d been doing that for years. Now, they sync with iCloud. So, you enable Safari in iCloud on your devices and everything is kept in sync. In theory.
Seriously, even for a dedicated nerd like myself it’s like playing wack-a-mole keeping everything working. If I put the same amount of effort I do maintaining my digital ecosystem into learning the piano, I’d be a concert pianist by now.
Anyway, even though Xmarks had my Safari bookmarks in sync and correct, my iOS devices were completely different. iCloud is supposed to essentially work like Xmarks and keep all your Safari bookmarks, on any computer or iOS device, in sync. Being Apple, everything usually just works. And also being Apple, it’s hard to get under the hood to really see what’s going on. You can’t just log into iCloud on a web browser and see your bookmarks to correct the master set that drives everything else. Hello Apple! That is a huge shortcoming, and seems like one of the first things you should create.
There’s a lot of chatter online about iCloud bookmarks and issues of the sort I was having. But, they also work perfectly for a lot of folks. So, here’s the solution.
You have to get all your Apple devices in a room like you’re having an Apple yard sale. Pick the one device you’re going to use to create your master bookmark set – in my case that’s my work MacBook which was synchronized with Xmarks. You need to create a backup of your bookmarks that you can restore from, because you’ll likely erase them at some point.
Now, on every Apple device but the master, you turn off Safari in iCloud. You will get a warning your data (bookmarks) will be deleted. Go ahead and delete them. Then go into Safari and make sure all your bookmarks are gone. You may have to do this twice on some devices to get it to work.
Then, once every device is wiped, toggle iCloud Safari on and off to make sure you are connected. At this stage you might want to either edit your bookmarks to get them where you want them to be, or delete everything and restore from the backup you made (you did this, right?).
At this point, you’ve got one computer where you want it and your iCloud bookmarks are probably what you want. However, since Apple doesn’t let you view your iCloud bookmarks directly, you’re just guessing.
To see if you’re good to go, turn on Safari in iCloud on one of your iOS devices. In a couple of minutes all the bookmarks will magically appear. What I did at this point was sync the master computer with Xmarks, which propagated perfectly to iCloud and then to my iPhone.
Once it’s working on one, you can turn your devices on one by one to get them all to sync, in my case , that’s two iPhones and two iPads (I told you it was a yard sale).
ICloud really does work pretty well for bookmarks sync. I’m not sure how mine got broken, but if you are syncing bookmarks across browsers it’s important to have only one computer bridging between whatever sync software that is – in my case Xmarks – and ICloud. This is my opinion, but I think this was the source of my issues, because two computers were using both Xmarks and Safari iCloud sync.
I am having no issues at all now and a change made on my iPhone bookmarks makes a corresponding change to my MacBook and then through Xmarks to two other computers and several browsers on each. Pretty cool, but that also why I simplified my browser bookmarks drastically so it wouldn’t overload and blow up. It works the other way too – a change made on IE on my Windows laptop will transfer over through Safari on my MacBook to all my mobile devices. I’m sure this is exactly what Steve Jobs was planning.
Some people have not had it so easy and have had to do more cleaning on all their machines to get it to work. This is a good blog post dealing with a more difficult situations and another bookmark sync app called Safari Prairiefire. Good luck and may your bookmarks always be pure.
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Thank you for this. My iOS devices were constantly merging old iCloud bookmarks with my Mac’s bookmarks. So annoying!
This is most helpful! Thank you! I have been struggling trying to get XMarks to work with iCloud for so long and it has been driving me batty. I knew there was a way it could be done regardless of what XMarks states in their documentation. One question though: I have multiple macs and presently I have both XMarks and iCloud sync going on all of them. Should I consider just having one mac do the iCloud syncing, say a machine that is always on like my mac mini at home? I just got everything so nice and tidy and it would be a shame were iCloud to freak out and duplicate everything again when I start adding new bookmarks, forcing me to repeat this process. It would seem like a logical choice, but I wonder if it is necessary. I do think it would slow down the sync process between all my devices, but that would be a small price to pay for accuracy. What would you recommend?
Thanks Mathew. Yes, I’d suggested just using one master machine as the sync between Xmarks and iCloud. It’s been over a year since I wrote this post and that’s what I’ve been doing and it’s kept everything matched up between my computers and iOS devices. Like you say, I’m using a master machine that’s almost always being used. Crazy to me the iCloud still doesn’t have a way to view and edit your own bookmarks.
Hey, you’ll be happy to know that things haven’t improved since last year! It’s still a f**cking pain to make everything work the way I want. Basically I did every single step you mentioned and I managed to make everything work right after I did the process. BUT as soon as I create a bookmark on my chrome browser (macbook), it brakes… xmarks syncs correctly so I can see my newest bookmark into safari (macbook) but it doesn’t show up on my iphone (safari iOS). I’d have to redo the entire syncing process to make things work (which is not even thinkable). Seems that xmarks + icloud syncing creates a conflict. Have you experienced the same troubles? What would you do?
Thanks for reading. I’m with you on it still being a pain. As long as you had only one computer (as opposed to iOS) Safari browser running both Xmarks and iCloud bookmarks I found it worked. And then I never made bookmark changes on my iOS devices, which could be limiting for some people. So, in your case if you’re checking Chrome -> Safari on that master machine, I would expect it to work and to propagate to the iOS devices.
This has been working from me since I wrote this post, but lately I’ve been having issues myself. However, it’s related to Xmarks not iCloud bookmarks. Some recent browser update has been giving me a duplicate bookmarks bar and I thinks Safari is the culprit. Xmarks for Safari seems to be the weakest of the 3 and the one that is most likely to give me an issue. Personally, I have moved almost every bookmark I can to http://www.pinboard.com and I use the smallest browser set I can. Then I keep a browser tab pinned to that and there are good iOS apps too.
Thank you for sharing your helpful observations. I have two Macs, each with the same set of three user profiles, where each profile uses FireFox and Safari, sync’d with Xmarks. Two of those profiles also sync with Android via Xmarks. The remaining profile syncs with an iPad via iCloud.
Establishing Xmarks was challenging. FireFox for one profile somehow had different names for the bookmarks toolbar across the two Macs — no idea how it got that way — making it impossible for sync properly. I resolved the matter, with the help of FireFox plugin FEBE, by backing up bookmarks on the preferred FireFox instance and restore/replacing the disfavored instance.
I intuitively (before reading your article) concluded that, in the interest of keeping things simple, only one Mac should bridge Xmarks and iCloud. Nonetheless, iCloud bookmarks stopped working for Safari on the iPad. I suspect that performing manual overwrite downloads in Xmarks could be an aggravating factor. Now that I have Xmarks stabilized, it’s time for me to apply your ideas with iCloud. . . .