File Bookmarks too big
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hi everyone, i wanted to make a backup of my bookmark file, but i see one file 980 kb (i have only 13 link and 1 folder with 26 link)....
same file of chrome is 16 kb....
then i've open my bookmamrk of vivaldi with notepad++ and see:
"meta_info": {
"Thumbnail": "data:image/jpeg;base64,/9j/4AAQSkZJRgABAQAAAQABAAD/4gIoSUNDX1BST0ZJTEUAAQEAAAIYAAAAAAIQAABtbnRyUkdCIFhZWiAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABhY3NwAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAQAA9tYAAQAAAADTLQAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAlkZXNjAAAA8AAAAHRyWFlaAAABZAAAABRnWFlaAAABeAAAABRiWFlaAAthis thumbnail data determines the file size.... if i delete and save these data, bookmarks don't work correctly on vivaldi....
why this difference with chrome?? but yet also chrome have thumbnail image on your bookmarks tab....
please, take away this curiosity! -
sorry, my mistake. I had a problem with my pc and i have restore my old bookmark from recycle bin... but now i have delete this file on ....Data\Vivaldi\Default, add manually my bookmark and now my bookmark file is only 29 kb!
problem solved. bye to everybody!
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well, i have created new bookmark but with navigation day by day, this file increases....
this is due to icon images.
if you want backup file, slim file, simply open bookmark with notepad++ then delete all info at thumbnail field, leave only "Thumbnail": ""
in this way bookmark file is lighter, ready for backup!
bye to everybody -
@swanx said in bookmark too big:
well, i have created new bookmark but with navigation day by day, this file increases....
this is due to icon images.
if you want backup file, slim file, simply open bookmark with notepad++ then delete all info at thumbnail field, leave only "Thumbnail": ""
in this way bookmark file is lighter, ready for backup!
bye to everybodyMy Bookmarks file is currently 66 MB. My History is 68, Favicons 93, and Top Sites is 221 MB. I can backup these files without any issues. Are you using floppy disks? All that easily fits on a CD, but of course I'm not using either of those for my backups.
I have not yet gone through and updated all my bookmarks to have thumbnails, but I'm planning to do so soon. That should probably increase the size of the file, I dunno, maybe even 10x. I use custom thumbnails for the Speed Dial, rather than what Vivaldi would create from the pages themselves. Well chosen images makes the Speed Dial much easier to use. Obviously I'm not wanting to delete this data from the file.
It's worth noting that my Bookmarks file contains almost no duplication or broken links. I have already gone through and removed all but about 40 duplicates (some bookmarks in the Speed Dial are also saved in the larger hierarchy), and I also removed or updated all but about a dozen broken links.
With today's storage devices, I'm not sure what the pressing need is to minimize the size of this one file. What are you using to backup your data that can't handle a few additional MB? Whatever it is, I recommend seeking a better solution. Not only does my Bookmarks file get backed up by shadow copies, but I export them a few times a week usually (which is stored on a redundant array). I've got at least 3 copies of all that data at any given time.
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good, i am happy for you!
i just wanted to give a personal contribution of a discovery, maybe small ...
in any way, i like it your idea for "custom thumbnails"...... but how to born custom thumbnails and put into bookmak file??? -
@swanx Your idea of saving space is good, I am also one of those that cares about minimizing space when possible. I'd prefer to spend the backup space for one more movie than some useless thumbnail in the browser bookmarks, for example.
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@swanx said in bookmark too big:
good, i am happy for you!
i just wanted to give a personal contribution of a discovery, maybe small ...
in any way, i like it your idea for "custom thumbnails"...... but how to born custom thumbnails and put into bookmak file???This is only for the Speed Dials. I don't know if you can do it for other bookmarks, probably, but it is most useful in the Speed Dials. When you open one of your Speed Dials, just right-click on it and choose custom thumbnail from the context menu that appears, then select any image you have stored. You'll want to download images to use before doing that, and save them somewhere on a local drive. Good images can be found by doing an image search for like "Facebook logo" or whatever the bookmark is for. Save a few as some will not crop properly.
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@iAN-CooG said in bookmark too big:
@swanx Your idea of saving space is good, I am also one of those that cares about minimizing space when possible. I'd prefer to spend the backup space for one more movie than some useless thumbnail in the browser bookmarks, for example.
This is a perfect example of a red herring. While the basis of your argument seems logical, saving space for movies, it has no relevance to this discussion.
Assuming you're talking about old school DIVX movies that could be burned on a CD, because they're compressed to boxy hell that nobody would watch one on a TV today unless it's some rare video lost to the world aside from that one file, you would need to delete 5.5 million thumbnails. For a single 4K movie, it's about half a billion. For a video recorded on my phone, 50 thousand thumbnails would not even get me 2 seconds of video.
I'd prefer to save my time and take advantage of modern technology's pleasant features. This kind of space savings is meaningless, and the time spent deleting it is rarer than that divx video that's been saved for 18 years. To put it back in terms of the tongue in cheek joke I made previously… you'd have to delete over 10 thousand thumbnails to save enough space to fill a floppy disk - the high density 3.5" floppy.
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this trick it is not for saving space! everybody have HD to 500 GB or 1TB, dimension of bookmark it is not relevant... this it's just to understand how it works vivaldi bookmark with thumbnail data!
@ bonetone
you have try to add one simple image to another bookmark?? try and write here if is possible... i don't think so.... -
@swanx said in bookmark too big:
you have try to add one simple image to another bookmark?? try and write here if is possible... i don't think so....
You can actually add thumbnails to any bookmark you want, both from the Bookmarks Manager and the Bookmarks Panel:
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@swanx said in bookmark too big:
this trick it is not for saving space! everybody have HD to 500 GB or 1TB, dimension of bookmark it is not relevant... this it's just to understand how it works vivaldi bookmark with thumbnail data!
@ bonetone
you have try to add one simple image to another bookmark?? try and write here if is possible... i don't think so....@Komposten gave you the screenshot. The button at the top will update the thumbnails for all selected bookmarks, or if a folder is selected it will update all the bookmarks that are direct children of it (it will not update the bookmarks contained in subfolders). The button on the thumbnail itself will update that bookmark only. So to update a single bookmark, and see how big it was, first I copied my Bookmarks file to a tmp directory, then found a bookmark that didn't have an existing thumbnail (so as to not just replace data but add data), and updated that bookmark's thumbnail - Vivaldi accesses the webpage and creates a thumbnail based on the page. I again copied the Bookmarks file to a tmp dir. Ran a diff on the two files and the only change was that one bookmark having a thumbnail now. Took that size of the original file and subtracted it from the new file. I had to open the properties of each file because the change wasn't big enough to be reported in the file manager.
To give you a little more insight into how this works, not every bookmark saves the image data in the file. Often what happens is the image gets saved onto the drive in your profile as a regular image file, and the Thumbnail field contains a URL to it instead. If you were trying to save space, and were deleting these files, it still wouldn't result in much savings - 8,000 of them wouldn't fill a CD. I believe the vast majority of my thumbnails are saved this way. I suppose I could awk it to find out, or maybe I'll come up with something more clever as I am working on some bookmark maintenance code when I've got free time to do so.
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tanxs for your reply! but i don't have understand...
The button at the top update thumbnails, ok.
but how to set one my personal thumbnails on my bookmark?? -
ahhhhh.... now i have understand what you mean!
but let's talk about two different things....
you talk about thumbnails in bookmark manager... and ok.
but i talk about change little image icon on single bookmark, on bookmark bar....!
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@swanx said in File Bookmarks too big:
ahhhhh.... now i have understand what you mean!
but let's talk about two different things....
you talk about thumbnails in bookmark manager... and ok.
but i talk about change little image icon on single bookmark, on bookmark bar....!
I have been talking about the "Thumbnail" field in the Bookmarks file mentioned in the OP. So, just for clarity, when reading all my posts in this thread, they apply to that - including all the UI comments, those are all related to the "Thumbnail" field in the Bookmarks file.
The images in your screenshot here are called favicons. These are stored in a different file, named appropriately, Favicons. This is a SQLite file, and can't be read as plaintext. I haven't really dug too deeply into it, so can't provide much more insight into it, except to say that I think it stores that info for more than just your bookmarks.
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ah ok, tanxs. sorry for not having understood what you were referring to.....
in fact i was referring precisely at favicons...
the confusion arises from the fact that also on Bookmark file on Data\Vivaldi\Default have a Thumbnail information...... and i thought that these info could be customized..... -
I think what's confusing a bit here is that this has apparently changed a bit over the versions. From what I understand, the base64-encoded thumbnails were generated in an earlier version, maybe? And there appears to be a lot of broken links to older versions of stored thumbnails in the Bookmarks file.
For instance this type is broken:
chrome://thumb/http://bookmark_thumbnail/888
There are two options for the bookmark, use custom thumbnail and generate thumbnail.
If you choose generate, it will look like this in the file:
"Thumbnail": "chrome://vivaldi-data/thumbnail/10a0ac74-943b-4887-b4ea-93d53f1f16c1.png"
This points to a locally stored file in the VivaldiThumbnails directory.If you choose custom thumbnail:
"Thumbnail": "chrome://vivaldi-data/local-image/bee7b71a-07c6-44cc-b466-fb351c30b861"
This is referenced in file_mapping.json:
"bee7b71a-07c6-44cc-b466-fb351c30b861": { "local_path": "E:\\Bilder\\Diverse\\bub.png"}
I think the old style of storing thumbs as base64 is no longer used, which is good. But the old ones won't get cleaned up automatically. You can generate new thumbnails for all bookmarks by selecting bookmarks and then "Update thumbnails" from Manage Bookmarks. Problem is, the UI isn't exactly great - you can choose individual bookmarks or folders, but it won't update sub-folders... and if the site is unavailable you get a "broken image" icon instead.
Also, the default bookmarks that Vivaldi provides will still have base64-encoded thumbnails in the Bookmarks file so they will have thumbs from the beginning.
Note that if you update thumbnails for the SD folder, this will break any custom thumbnails obviously (as I just found out)
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So there is a work around for the issue that @Pathduck and I were talking about: how subfolders don't get updated when you click the Update Thumbnails button - only selected bookmarks or direct children if a folder is selected. What one can do is use a search. First right-click and choose Settings / Flat Search. Then you can just search for the letter h, or "http". This will give you the vast majority of your bookmarks in the results. Select all (except maybe the folders that appear) and click update. You might not see any ftp bookmarks, javascript bookmarklets, vivaldi:// pages, extension pages or local files you have bookmarked, but you can then do further searches for those if you want.
While this workaround will give you a list of most of your bookmarks, I can't really use it. I have way too many bookmarks to update them all at the same time. I've queued up a couple thousand thumbnail updates before, and it does put a little bit of a strain on resources when you're dealing with a library this large. So I am still just slowly working my way through my library updating them folder by folder. I don't mind though as at the end of last year I merged all my different bookmark collections from various browsers & systems. I groomed all the duplicates out, and whenever I have a little bit of time have been sorting the bookmarks that weren't previously organized. I'm down to about 1500 unsorted left, and about 2500 partially sorted. So I update the thumbnails for bookmarks as I sort them, and then I'm also slowly working my way down the tree updating each folder.
Also, I think I mentioned this here or in another thread, but when you are creating custom thumbnails you'll want to store the image on an internal drive, preferably the system drive. If you put them on an external drive they can become unavailable. And if they are on something like a hard drive array that spins down, you'll have to wait for all those drives to spin up before the thumbnails display.
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@bonetone Yes, and if the user is worried about disk space usage - the VivaldiThumbnails folder can get quite large if you have a lot of bookmarks. I created thumbs for 862 bookmarks, and the folder is ~90MB. But at least you won't have to worry about the Bookmarks file containing all the data :smiling_face_with_open_mouth_closed_eyes:
IMO thumbnails are pretty much useless anyway. I'd rather have consistently good favicons for sites than thumbnails of what the page looks like... But I guess some people use them for something.
Problem now that I've gone through and created all the thumbs, if I delete them without also cleaning the Bookmarks file, I will have the fugly "missing image" icon instead...
(Some creative regex search and replace can do the magic, but also break JSON very easily...) -
@Pathduck said in File Bookmarks too big:
@bonetone Yes, and if the user is worried about disk space usage - the VivaldiThumbnails folder can get quite large if you have a lot of bookmarks. I created thumbs for 862 bookmarks, and the folder is ~90MB. But at least you won't have to worry about the Bookmarks file containing all the data :smiling_face_with_open_mouth_closed_eyes:
Eh, depends on what counts as quite large... a single photograph is about 90 MB when you're shooting raw with a decent camera. The thumbnails folder in my profile contains over 8,000 images right now, and it's not enough data to even fill a CD. That is to say, it's less than 8 photographs. So, when I finally get every single bookmark thumbnail updated, if I'm looking at ~100k images they'd take up less space than 100 photographs - that's less than 1 day out with the camera, way less.
I suppose it's all a matter of perspective. If you're running Vivaldi on a netbook from 10 years ago, you're not going to want to have thumbnails for a bookmark library this large. But, since it's storing the images outside of the bookmark file nowadays, you can still use the images on your workstation and only have the bookmarks themselves on the netbook.
IMO thumbnails are pretty much useless anyway. I'd rather have consistently good favicons for sites than thumbnails of what the page looks like... But I guess some people use them for something.
Like that, perspective. I like the thumbnails, especially in Speed Dials but also for regular bookmarks. They serve a different purpose in addition to favicons. But, with Vivaldi, we can all get it configured to do what we want for us.
Problem now that I've gone through and created all the thumbs, if I delete them without also cleaning the Bookmarks file, I will have the fugly "missing image" icon instead...
(Some creative regex search and replace can do the magic, but also break JSON very easily...)No backup? Always backup before mucking around with tests like this. Export to HTML & copy off the Bookmarks file itself... actually, just copy off the entire Default or whatever name your profile folder is. Set up some sort of schedule to either copy the files to your backup location, or archive them with 7zip/WinRAR. Or, are you running Win10, and have File History enabled? You may be able to restore the prior version with that - let me know if you need a little guidance on investigating that.
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@bonetone said in File Bookmarks too big:
my profile contains over 8,000 images right now, and it's not enough data to even fill a CD
Meh... I guess I'm just OCD about disk space waste, and 600MB of useless (for me) images would be something to zap with no quarter given
I like the thumbnails, especially in Speed Dials but also for regular bookmarks.
Oh yeah, definitely for the SD, but I use custom thumbs there anyway. I guess I just don't see the point of a thumb showing how a site looks. A lot of the fancy "web 2.0" JS-based sites will just show a white page anyway.
No backup? Always backup before mucking around with tests like this.
Did I say I didn't backup? A backup is kind of a given
I have weekly backups of my system drive as well as a separate file-backup of important files, so I'm sorted thanks mate Actually keeping C: as clean as possible is one of the reasons I don't like useless files and try to keep it below 20GB to limit the size of the system disk backup.