Import your Raindrop export into Bookmend

Install Bookmend free — reads your Chrome bookmarks directly, no account needed

Raindrop.io is a capable bookmark manager, and if you have a Raindrop collection built up over time, those links represent genuine work — collecting, tagging, and organizing things you cared about. If you want to bring those links into Chrome’s native bookmark folder and then have Bookmend scan them for dead links and make them searchable by content, the path is straightforward. This post covers the exact steps, what gets preserved in the export, and how Bookmend works once the links are in Chrome.

Why Someone Would Import Raindrop into Chrome

There are a few common situations that bring people to this workflow.

Moving away from Raindrop: Some users want to consolidate back to Chrome’s native bookmarks. Chrome bookmarks are local by default, require no subscription, and work without an account. Exporting from Raindrop and importing into Chrome moves the entire collection into Chrome’s folder with minimal friction.

Wanting dead-link coverage on Raindrop saves: Raindrop keeps your links in Raindrop’s system. Links you saved in Raindrop three or four years ago may now be dead, but Raindrop does not provide a systematic dead-link detection and Wayback Machine recovery workflow. Importing those links into Chrome and running Bookmend over them is how you audit the collection for rot.

Bridging both systems: Some people use Raindrop for curated, actively maintained saves and Chrome bookmarks for everything else. Exporting from Raindrop periodically and importing into Chrome keeps the Chrome folder current, and Bookmend monitors both the imported Raindrop links and the rest of the Chrome collection together.

There is no scenario where you “import into Bookmend” directly — Bookmend is not a separate bookmark manager, it is a repair layer over Chrome’s native bookmark folder.

How Raindrop’s Export Works

Raindrop.io supports exporting your entire bookmark collection or individual collections. The export is available in three formats: HTML, CSV, and TXT.

HTML export: Produces a standard Netscape HTML bookmarks file — the same format Chrome uses for its own export and import. This file captures your bookmark URLs, titles, collection structure as folder hierarchy, and creation timestamps. It is directly importable into Chrome and any other major browser without conversion.

CSV export: Produces a comma-delimited spreadsheet with columns for URL, title, folder, tags, note, and creation date. This is useful for processing the data in a spreadsheet application, importing into a service that accepts CSV, or writing a custom script. Chrome cannot directly import this format.

TXT export: A plain text list of URLs, one per line. Minimal metadata, not importable into Chrome directly.

For the purpose of getting bookmarks into Chrome, the HTML export is the correct choice every time.

Exporting from Raindrop as HTML

The export flow in Raindrop is in the Settings area of the web app.

1. Open Raindrop.io in your browser and log in
2. Click on your profile icon or the main menu to access Settings
3. Navigate to the Backup / Export section (the exact label may vary slightly based on the current version of the interface)
4. Click Export and select HTML as the format
5. Raindrop generates and downloads a bookmarks.html file

The download is immediate for most collections. Very large collections may take a moment to generate. The resulting file contains all your bookmarks organized into folders that mirror your Raindrop collection structure.

If you want to export only a specific collection rather than everything, open that collection in Raindrop, look for the collection-level options menu, and check for a per-collection export option. This lets you export a subset of your Raindrop library if you only want to bring certain bookmarks into Chrome.

Importing the HTML Export into Chrome

With the HTML file downloaded, importing into Chrome takes about 30 seconds.

1. Open Chrome’s Bookmark Manager: press Ctrl+Shift+O on Windows and Linux, or Cmd+Shift+O on Mac
2. Click the three-dot menu in the top-right corner of the Bookmark Manager
3. Select Import bookmarks
4. Navigate to and select your bookmarks.html file from Raindrop
5. Click Open

Chrome imports all the bookmarks and creates a folder structure that mirrors the Raindrop collection hierarchy. Your top-level Raindrop collections become top-level folders in Chrome’s bookmarks, and any nested collections become nested subfolders.

The import places bookmarks in the Bookmarks Bar or Other Bookmarks area depending on Chrome’s import behavior — you can reorganize them afterward using Chrome’s normal drag-and-drop interface in the Bookmark Manager.

What Happens to Raindrop Collections and Tags

The Netscape HTML format that Chrome imports supports folders and nested folders. Raindrop’s collection hierarchy maps onto this structure cleanly — each collection becomes a bookmark folder, and nested collections become nested folders. This means your organizational structure from Raindrop transfers intact.

Tags, however, do not have a direct equivalent in the Netscape HTML format. The HTML standard for bookmarks represents organization as a folder hierarchy. Raindrop tags are a many-to-many organizational system (one bookmark can have multiple tags; one tag can span multiple collections), and this cannot be represented in a simple folder structure. Tags from Raindrop are not preserved in the HTML export’s folder structure.

If you used Raindrop tags as your primary organizational method and relied on them heavily, this is worth knowing before you commit to the Chrome import. The folder structure you built in Raindrop does transfer; the tag layer does not.

Notes you added to bookmarks in Raindrop may also not be preserved in the HTML format, depending on Raindrop’s export implementation. Titles and URLs always transfer.

How Bookmend Works Once the Links Are in Chrome

After the import, your Raindrop bookmarks are standard Chrome bookmarks. Bookmend reads them identically to any other bookmark in your collection.

Full-text search: Bookmend indexes the actual content of every bookmarked page, not just titles and URLs. This means you can search for any word or phrase that appears on those pages — useful for finding articles you saved without remembering their exact titles. The indexing runs on-device; no content is uploaded.

Dead-link detection: Bookmend checks each URL for failures: 404 errors, DNS failures (domain expired), parked domains, and soft-404 redirects (pages that return 200 OK but serve a homepage or error page). A link is only flagged as dead after two checks separated by at least 48 hours, to filter out temporary outages.

Wayback Machine recovery: For confirmed dead links, Bookmend queries the Wayback Machine for the snapshot closest to when you originally saved the bookmark. It shows you the archived page and asks you to confirm before replacing the dead URL in your bookmarks.

Duplicate detection: If any of your imported Raindrop links duplicate links already in your Chrome bookmarks, Bookmend surfaces those duplicates for review.

None of this requires any additional configuration. Bookmend reads the Chrome bookmarks folder — the import from Raindrop put the links there, and Bookmend covers them from that point forward.

What to Expect: Dead Links in Your Raindrop Archive

The dead-link rate in any collection depends heavily on how old the bookmarks are and what kinds of sites they link to.

Links to established news organizations and large publications tend to have better longevity, though even major sites restructure URLs over time. Links to personal blogs, small business sites, startup projects, and independent creator content are more variable — these are exactly the sites that get abandoned, change domain names, or move behind paywalls.

For Raindrop collections that contain links from more than three or four years ago, expect a meaningful percentage of dead links. Bookmend’s confirmation rule (two failed checks, 48 hours apart) means the dead-link count it surfaces reflects confirmed failures, not temporary server issues.

Recovering Dead Links via the Wayback Machine

When Bookmend confirms a bookmark is dead, it looks up the Wayback Machine for the archived snapshot closest to the date you first saved the link. The Wayback Machine has been archiving the web since 1996 and holds hundreds of billions of saved pages. Many URLs that are now dead have surviving snapshots.

Bookmend uses the original save date — stored in Chrome’s bookmark metadata, preserved from the Raindrop import — to find the snapshot most relevant to what you originally saved. A page you saved in 2021 may have several Wayback Machine snapshots from that period. Bookmend selects the closest one to your save date rather than defaulting to the most recent snapshot, which might show a significantly different version of the page.

For each dead bookmark, you see the proposed archive replacement and confirm or skip it. If no snapshot exists, Bookmend tells you — it does not offer a fake recovery path or substitute an unrelated archived page.

Using Both Raindrop and Bookmend Together

If you want to keep using Raindrop for ongoing bookmark curation while also maintaining a Chrome bookmarks collection under Bookmend’s monitoring, you can run both without conflict.

Raindrop stores your curated collection in Raindrop’s cloud. Chrome’s bookmark folder holds its own collection. They are independent systems. You can:

• Export from Raindrop periodically and re-import into Chrome to keep the Chrome folder updated
• Save new bookmarks to both systems where overlap makes sense
• Use Raindrop’s organizational tools for curated collections and Bookmend for dead-link monitoring and content search in Chrome

Bookmend works on whatever is in Chrome’s bookmarks folder, regardless of where those bookmarks came from. It does not care whether a bookmark was added manually in Chrome, imported from a file, or synced from another device. The entire Chrome bookmark folder is its scope.

Getting Started

To import your Raindrop collection and bring it under Bookmend’s coverage:

1. In Raindrop, go to Settings and export as HTML
2. In Chrome, open Bookmark Manager (Ctrl+Shift+O), click the three-dot menu, and import the HTML file
3. Install Bookmend from the Chrome Web Store — one click, no account required
4. Bookmend reads your Chrome bookmarks immediately, including the imported Raindrop links

The whole process from export to Bookmend coverage takes about five minutes.

Install Bookmend free from the Chrome Web Store — no account, no migration, works with whatever is already in your Chrome bookmarks folder.