Re-importing Opera 12 Bookmarks into Opera 19, 20 etc

Question

I'm setting up a new laptop and installed Opera 12 and Opera 20 (since Opera 20 doesn't properly support bookmarks yet, and I have several thousand in Opera 12). I installed both versions of Opera before I copied across my Opera 12 bookmarks from my old machine.

Now I want to import the Opera 12 bookmarks on the bookmarks bar into Opera 20 (ie the few dozen I use every day). However, I find that the Opera 20 bookmark importer (Opera menu > More tools > Bookmark importer) is greyed out. I assume this is because I installed Opera 20 before I copied my Opera 12 bookmarks across from my old machine, so Opera 20 thinks there were no bookmarks to import.

How do I tell Opera 20 to re-import the Opera 12 bookmarks? ie How can I get it to re-read the Opera 12 bookmarks file so I can import them?

Solution 1

The Opera Windows forum has the following answer, thanks to users leocg and defcormax:

Open a command prompt (I do it by opening the Run window and typing "cmd", without the quotes);

In the command prompt change directory to the Opera application folder (on my x64 computer this is C:\Program Files (x86)\Opera);

Then, in the command prompt type "launcher --presto-small-prefs-dir={ROAMING_PROFILE_DIR}", without the quotes, replacing {ROAMING_PROFILE_DIR} with the folder that contains your Opera 12 profile (ie the folder that contains your Opera 12 bookmarks.adr). For me that folder was C:\Users{MY USER NAME}\AppData\Roaming\Opera\Opera.

This will launch Opera 20, replacing the profile with the converted Opera 12 one.

Solution 2

Abuse Chrome

Chrome and Opera 15+ use the same file structure for their bookmarks file. They are interchangeable

1. Export all your old Opera 12 bookmarks as HTML
2. Import them to Chrome (portable).
3. Copy the bookmarks file from Chrome's profile folder and replace the bookmarks file in Opera 15+ profile folder.

^{Note to myself: Write a batch and place it autostart to one-way-sync Opera to Chrome}

Comments

[SUMIT]

It worked but in a random sort of way. All my bookmarks were originally under a single root folder but after exporting to HTML, importing to Chrome then copying to Opera 20 I ended up with several dozen folders in the bookmarks bar. Some folders had been moved out of the root folder into the bookmarks bar but many others remained in the root folder. There didn't seem to be any logic in which moved and which stayed. In contrast, the fix provided in the Opera forums (see other answer) only imported the folders and bookmarks displayed in the bookmarks bar in Opera 12.

[nixda]

@SimonTewsi I cannot reproduce your behavior. I have over 50+ folders and subfolders and they all were kept in the correct order. Are you sure nothing else went wrong?

[SUMIT]

I'm seeing the same issue in Chrome, with folders randomly extracted from the root folder, so I'm guessing it was either the export to HTML from Opera 12 or the import into Chrome that caused the problem. Maybe it's a matter of scale. At the last count, maybe a year ago, I had over 1000 folders (although only 21 of those are top-level folders directly under the root folder, the rest are nested under those top-level folders) and about 9000 bookmarks.

[Johnny Utahh]

This too breaks for me. Few (or at least not all) bookmark folders copied. But I have fewer folders and bookmarks than @SimonTewsi, I'm guessing less than 300 folders (again, a guess). I've hunted for working Opera->Chrome bookmark procedures, with no success.