I have talked before on this blog about my struggle with bookmarks. Bookmarks have always been a pain for me, because on one hand I love saving articles and websites, but on the other hand I have no good way to organize them.
My current solution doesn't work too well, because I have 2 different methods. On desktop, I use Vivaldi's bookmark system, which works well because I have better organization for it. However, I'm too organized and have so many bookmarks that using it can become overwhelming. My second solution is using the pinned tabs feature in Arc browser. I don't use Arc on desktop because the Windows version sucks, however on mobile I will frequently pin tabs. This works well at first, however when you start having more and more bookmarks they start piling up. And you can only use organizational features such as making folders on desktop. And having to open a separate browser to see bookmarks is annoying.
In an attempt to try and get more control over my bookmarks, I decided to try out a service called raindrop.io. And I can happily say, in some circumstances, it does indeed work.
raindrop.io is essentially a bookmark manager, but as a platform instead of a feature built into your browser. I thought this would make it annoying to add new bookmarks, but using things such as the browser extension and sharing to the mobile app, it works quite well.
One of the things I really like is how there is an explicit "Unsorted" section. Not everything has a specific place to go, so having a place for "everything else" is nice. There are 3 ways that everything is organized in raindrop.io:
- Folders
- Tags
- Collections
Folders are exactly how they sound. Although they are what I use the most, I wish folders and tags would just become one thing. Maybe for specific collections related to projects folders are nice, but some of my bookmarks can belong to more than one folder. However, folders are the thing they want you to use, as they allow you to nest them and set icons. Collections are whatever, they're just automated collections of things such as articles, music, photos, links, videos, etc.
One thing that is nice about raindrop.io are the different views. However, it would be nice if the views were better implemented. There are 4 different types of views:
- Article (information along with an image)
- Grid
- Moodboard (grid but the images are full size instead of uniform)
- Headline ("compact mode" for article, only shows favicon instead of image)
On top of these different views, you can also toggle pieces of information, such as image, title, notes, highlights, metadata, etc. This is nice. However, there is a big problem.
It is very inconsistent with what views are used where. For example, I like to use headline view when on the "All bookmarks" page, because I like the compact look. However, changing the view settings here also changes it for collections. So when I do this, I also have the same compact view for the images page. I want to see images on the images page, but if I set that to moodboard, now all bookmarks has that view. But some folders still have a different view. It's annoying. And sometimes when you reload, your views are reset, so that makes things extra annoying.
Another thing I wish there was is better automation. For example, if I save something from a certain website, automatically add the related website as a tag. And you should be able to apply icons to tags, as well as nest them. I know you can just do a search for the website, but I would rather have everything at the ready.
There are a couple other neat features, such as notes and highlights, but I don't use these as much.
Overall, I like raindrop.io, and I might continue to use it. It being a web app wasn't that big of a deal, as I don't always need to be in my bookmarks.