How to copy your favorite website URLs in Safari for iPhone to the clipboard

copy favorite website URLs safari iPhone iPad

So you’ve spent countless hours organizing a bunch of websites you frequent the most in Safari and saving them as your Favorites collection to revisit later, or putting them in custom bookmark folders like “Work”, “Games” or some such, only to realize that you cannot easily export their underlying URLs to share with others. Thankfully, Safari for iPhone and iPad provides a not-so-obvious option that lets you do just that. In this step-by-step tutorial, we’re going to show you how to copy your favorite website URLs in Safari for iPhone and iPad.

Follow along with us as we detail this hidden Safari trick, allowing you to quickly copy your favorite website URLs from any of your bookmark folders or your Favorites.

How to copy favorite website URLs in Safari

Here’s what you need to do in order to grab those multiple website URLs in one fell swoop and use the collected website addresses to quickly share your favorites with friends or family.

1) Open Safari on your iPhone or iPad.

2) Tap and hold the Bookmarks icon at the bottom, it’s the second icon from the right.

3) Now tap the Bookmarks tab to show your bookmarked websites and bookmark folders.

4) Tap and hold, or press, the built-in Favorites folder on the list, or any of your previously-created custom folders for that matter, then choose the Copy Contents option from the menu.

And just like that, all of the underlying website URLs get copied to the system clipboard.

copy favorite website URLs safari iPhone
Perform Copy Contents on a bookmark folder to copy group website URLs to the clipboard.

You can now paste this in another app or document, like Messages or Pages. This is particularly useful if you’d like to quickly share several of your favorite website URLs with someone, as noted by French blog iGeneration.fr through which I first learned about this trick.

TUTORIAL: How to use bookmark folders in Safari

There doesn’t seem to be any officially-sanctioned way to replicate this useful functionality on the Mac, or at least I was unable to find the corresponding option in Safari for macOS.

In case you didn’t know, you can easily set Safari to show a different folder in Favorites.

copy favorite website URLs safari iPad
Long-tap or press Favorites or a custom bookmark folder to reveal the shortcut menu with the Copy Contents option.

On macOS Catalina 10.15 and later, click the Safari menu and choose Preferences. Next, click the General tab, then click the popup menu next to “Favorites shows” and select one of the previously created bookmark folders to serve as your new Favorites folder.

On iOS 13 and later, you can choose where your Favorites are saved in Safari by going to Settings → Safari → Favorites, then select one of your previously created folder that contains favorites that you’d like to see when you choose Favorites from your bookmarks.

Need help? Ask iDB!

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