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July 14, 2015

We have these bookmarks

So, I’ve been using Google Bookmarks with a throwaway spam account on public computers. It works pretty well and I like the tagging/labels feature. I ended up with so many bookmarks in my spam account that I decided I wanted to merge them with my "real" Google account. It turns out this isn’t as straightforward as you might think.

Google Bookmarks lets users export their bookmarks into an HTML file, but there’s no import feature for bringing them into a different Google account. Thankfully, there is a workaround. The following steps are how I accomplished this after a bit of research.

  1. Export bookmarks from the old account’s Google Bookmarks.
  2. Import bookmarks into Internet Explorer. (No, for real. Internet Explorer.)
  3. Install Google Toolbar onto Internet Explorer.
  4. Get a Windows command prompt by opening PowerShell; navigate to Internet Explorer’s Favorites folder.
  5. Run the following script in PowerShell to recursively rename all the previously imported bookmarks, giving them a ".url" extension instead of their original ".URL" extensions. (The subsequent steps won’t work if the bookmark links have uppercase file extensions. It’s 2015 and this bug is still there.)
  6. get-childItem -recurse | Where {$_.extension -eq ".URL"} | rename-item -newname { $_.name -replace ".URL",".url" }
  7. Login to Google Toolbar using the new account.
  8. Use the Bookmarks pulldown menu in Google Toolbar to import the Internet Explorer bookmarks (it’s at the bottom).
  9. You should now see an import jobbie in the new account’s Google Bookmarks to pull the bookmark collection from Google Toolbar while keeping the old account’s labels and tags, if it hasn’t done it already.

The source for all of the above information is comes from the following two pages:
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/gmail/vrWdNGoX_qE
http://superuser.com/questions/403183/how-to-rename-multiple-files-in-multiple-folders-with-1-command

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