Bookmark folders imported from Opera 12 are not alphabetized – and I have >400.
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I have imported my bookmarks (bare and in >400 sometimes nested folders) from Opera 12, but I cannot yet switch over to Vivaldi, because the folders are out of order. I am sure I am not alone in having over 10 years worth of Opera bookmarks which I depend on heavily. If I knew what to do to the bookmarks text file, I might take a crack at putting it in a form that Vivaldi would swallow properly, but I don't know what Vivaldi is looking for. At any rate, this is a show-stopper for me, which I regret, because there are more and more sites that function with Vivaldi but not with Opera 12. Many thanks for this entire endeavor.
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I have something like 1200-1400. I alphabetized them by hand.
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Vivaldi's built in bookmarks manager leaves a lot to be desired. It has close to no functionality and is very buggy. Try dragging a bookmark from one folder to another, watch as every folder expands in the wake of your cursor. Try clicking on one bookmark or folder and dragging any other bookmark or folder to any location, watch as the last thing you clicked is moved instead of the thing you were dragging. Try renaming something, watch as Vivaldi ignores a good bit of your input and randomly erases letters as you type them. Bookmarks is a really basic feature that I'd rather like to see working out of the box, and it really needs to get more attention from the devs. But I digress.
There are a couple of things you can do to automagically get your bookmarks sorted. I usually recommend people to visit vivaldi://bookmarks in their browser, but internal urls are broken right now and have been for the last couple of snapshots. If you're running TP4, it should still work, and you can follow the steps in this post from another thread to organize your bookmarks from Vivaldi.
If you're running a more recent snapshot, you'll need to export your bookmarks from Opera to an HTML file, and then import that file to another browser, use its bookmark manager to sort your bookmarks, then export them from there to another HTML file, and finally import those to Vivaldi.
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More power to you!! But I don't think that that is going to endear Vivaldi to anyone. Those things really need to come in alphabetized, don't you think?
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Of course. But the browser is still only partially developed, and the bookmarks manager is one of those aspects that needs a lot of love before it's ready for prime time.
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More power to you!! But I don't think that that is going to endear Vivaldi to anyone. Those things really need to come in alphabetized, don't you think?
No, I don't think they should — they should come in sorted in My Order, otherwise, I would have to reorganise them all again. Within most of my folders, the bookmarks are sorted, but the folders are not, and some folders have separators.
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^ This is true for me as well. Especially on my speed dial. I only put sites that I visit very often - usually daily - on my speed dial, and I organize them manually both based on what kind of website they are and how frequently I visit them. Entertainment websites come first, then community forums like this one, then tech news, and then my website. Organizing my speed dial alphabetically would break my browsing flow.
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What I see is that the bookmarks file generated by Opera 12 scrambles the order of the bookmarks – whatever that may have been. I keep mine alphabetized through no particular genius of my own: for years I have clicked "New folder" in Opera, and Opera has slid it into the 'right' place with no action on my part. When I ask Opera 12 to export the bookmarks, though, it seems to go right off the rails: it dumps everything into a basket, gives it a shake, and writes it out to text. This means that when Vivaldi gets handed the text file of (now disordered) bookmarks, it dutifully reproduces the order it found in the file. GOOD! This means that Vivaldi is acting sanely.
The problem now becomes writing a script that will put the bookmark text file into the order you might have expected to get from Opera 12. ( Vivaldi has its File > Import data > Opera 12 > Opera bookmarks file selection, so, although I haven't verified this, I presume that that function asks for the path to a bookmarks file.) Does anyone have any suggestions or tips about best ways to use, say, Python to rearrange an Opera bookmarks file?
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I'm pretty sure Opera does not "disorder" the bookmarks. In the database Opera builds initially to store bookmarks, I'm pretty sure they are stored in the order of the date they were created. That you see them in alphabetical order in the UI of Opera is an artifact of the rather clever "views" technology which Opera pioneered. The data is not reordered or duplicated, it is just displayed to you via the "views" you select. Email is the most obvious of the applications where we see this, but I think Bookmarks are no different.
When Opera exports the bookmarks, it just spits out the raw data, unmodified. It does not export it in an alphabetized "view" form.
That's how it seems to me, anyway.
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Very likely so, and good to have a private guess confirmed. Now, how does one convert a chronologically ordered view to an alphabetized one so that Vivaldi can start off showing things as I, at least, would expect? Or is the internal date-of-origin ordering a 'good thing', and should we hope that Vivaldi comes to provide views that keep people happy. (Personally, I would think that most people object least to alphabetized lists, but then I usually head for the index first. )
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I think one way or the other, Vivaldi will come up with an option to sort bookmarks. First, probably, in alphabetical order. Later, perhaps by date and/or domain, or whatever. In the meantime, we suffer.
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I recently added a whole load of bookmarks to Opera 12.17. I did not add them in alphabetical order, but I manually sorted them in alphabetical order as I added them to a new folder.
I imported my bookmarks into Vivaldi, and all of these new bookmarks are in the same order as they are in Opera. My older bookmarks, which in some cases are not in alphabetical order, are also in the same order.
[attachment=1681]MyOrder.png[/attachment]
So Vivaldi is doing the right thing — it imports them in My Order.
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How interesting. It did not do that for me. It appeared to import them in date order, but in the same folders and subfolders they had been in.
This was when importing bookmarks was first possible so I can't vouch for how it is working now. I do know for certain that when you export bookmarks from Opera 12 to HTML, the order is not preserved. If in any order at all, it is in "created" order.
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Turn off sorting in 12 (switch it to "My order") and sort it by hand. My order lists the bookmarks in the order they are stored in the file and always has, and when automatic sorting has been disabled then moving things in the browser also moves them in the file.
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I'm pretty sure Opera does not "disorder" the bookmarks. In the database Opera builds initially to store bookmarks, I'm pretty sure they are stored in the order of the date they were created. That you see them in alphabetical order in the UI of Opera is an artifact of the rather clever "views" technology which Opera pioneered. The data is not reordered or duplicated, it is just displayed to you via the "views" you select. …
The bookmarks.adr file in Olde Opera isn't simply chronological in organization, though that seems to play something of a rough initial-creation role. Instead, it seems to be organized to focus around folders. Each folder (and subfolder) listing in the bookmarks.adr file is followed by its member bookmark details arrayed directly beneath it. Those bookmarks seem to be ordered in the file roughly as they were first introduced to the folder. The rationale for how the top folders are themselves sequenced within the bookmarks.adr file, I've never been able to fully deduce… but it doesn't follow a folder arrangement methodology that is purely chronological or alphabetical since the members of my 20 top-level bookmarks folders violate both of those, as do the sequences of most of my 550 subfolders beneath them. Perhaps some of the "magic" for the actual arranging involves the 32-character UniqueID assigned to each folder and bookmark in the bookmarks.adr file, and which seems to change each time a bookmark or folder is moved or edited.
How the bookmarks appear on a user's screen in Olde Opera's bookmarks manager is selected via the View option available by right clicking in the name panel of Opera's bookmarks manager and choosing a sorting option. That option appears to direct Opera in RAM to display the bookmarks and folders a certain way by sorting among the various file entry details that exist for each bookmark or folder entry in the bookmarks.adr file. The result is that the bookmarks.adr file itself is merely organized along a folder/included-bookmarks line that is essentially otherwise unordered. The displayed sorting one could obtain in Olde Opera was performed within RAM upon user direction, acting upon the bookmarks.adr file. Obviously, this has implications for importing Olde Opera bookmarks into another browser, since the Opera-viewed bookmarking organization existed mainly in the RAM-resident sorting selection made by the user.
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This comports with my observations.
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Thank you very much for your observations and insights. Isn't it wonderful how much you can find out when a database like the bookmarks are kept in plain text, albeit somewhat decorated? I hope that Vivaldi opts for a similar scheme: plain-text parsable file with a rich selection of views. In the meanwhile, it leaves kind of a mess in the bookmark corner, though. Well, some of you have been dogged enough to drag hundreds of bookmarks into preferred order, so who am I to complain? Thanks, everyone. It's a pleasure to find such a pleasant forum, and useful, too!
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We are working hard with getting you all this functionality. Clearly one expects to be able to sort bookmarks. Both manually and automatically. We will deliver.
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@jon:
We are working hard with getting you all this functionality. Clearly one expects to be able to sort bookmarks. Both manually and automatically. We will deliver.
Thanks for the reassurance! Never doubted it for a minute! :cheer:
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… Well, some of you have been dogged enough to drag hundreds of bookmarks into preferred order, so who am I to complain? ...
FWIW, some time ago when I moved to Firefox as a stopgap browser when the Opera design slid off its rails, I exported Olde Opera's bookmarks as an HTML file, then imported that file into Firefox and performed folder/bookmark sorting using FF's internal sorting options. The result was identical in appearance to what had been in my Olde Opera versions. Then, back in late January after I installed one of the early Vivaldi versions, I simply performed a Vivaldi 'import from Firefox'. The bookmarks came over all nicely organized, just as they were in FF (and in Olde Opera).
So, in one sense, there wasn't that much 'dogged' work involved in getting the bulk of my bookmarks organized to where they now stand on my Vivaldi installation. Once I had them all where I wanted them, the key has been to backup, backup, backup Vivaldi's profile folder. Then I can always "get back home" if bad things happen for whatever reason. Eventually Vivaldi will develop their own sorting and management capability, I have no doubt. In the meantime, I can always restore them from my Vivaldi backups if they get hopelessly messed up.