How do I bookmark a Web site when I’m in Safari on my iPhone or iPad so I can go back to it later?
We’re all used to creating and working with bookmarks in our favorite Web browser on a computer, but when you get to portable devices with their own operating systems that aren’t quite Windows and aren’t quite Mac OS X, the process becomes a bit different. What’s cool is that it’s also more flexible, as you’ll see shortly, but as with so many things on a device like an iPhone 5 or iPad 2 (retina) the real challenge is knowing where the features and controls can be located. So let’s have a look!
First off, I’m going to pop over to a Web site that I’d like to remember by doing what is most typical nowadays, a Google search. In this case, for “Denver Art Museum”.
That brings me to their Web site with the Safari overlay of control bars and buttons:
If you aren’t seeing the address bar, the buttons along the bottom, etc, then you might need to swipe up so that you are viewing the top of the Web page in question.
Along the bottom are “previous”, “next”, “bookmark”, “favorites” and “windows” buttons, left to right. It’s the middle button along the bottom that you want, the box with the arrow pointing upwards out of it.
Tap it.
Ah, turns out it’s the “share and bookmark” button. Or maybe it’s just the “Share” button and bookmarking is one form of sharing?
In any case, if you’ve set up your various accounts, it’s super easy to share a link with your Twitter followers or Facebook friends, send it to someone via an SMS text message, or email it to whomever, as you can see.
What you want, however, is on the second row of buttons, so swipe down just a smidge:
As you can see, there’s more than one “bookmark” option here. The leftmost is the standard one – and we’ll do that in a second – but notice you can also add things to your reading list and if you have iCloud set up properly, it’ll automatically appear on the reading list for your Safari browsers across your Mac systems (which means you can then read it later on your iMac or MacBook if you so desire). The middle option, “Add to Home Screen”, is another neat one: it creates an appropriate icon and creates a button on your iOS device that looks the same as an app button. Handy if you want to have really easy shortcuts to specific sites.
Finally, copy lets you later paste it into another app on your device, and print, well, prints if you have AirPrint enabled and configured.
In this case, just tap on “Bookmark” on the left, however.
Edit it as desired, specify the Location you’d prefer by tapping and seeing what choices you have, and tap “Save” on the top right when you’re done.
That’s it. Easy enough! And if you have iCloud set up, bookmarks also sync across devices too, so adding it on your iPad 2 or retina iPad means it’ll also show up on your iPhone, MacBook Pro, etc.