Quick Tip: Using Hookmark to help deal with multiple Dropbox or Google Drive folders

Discussion & Help
1

Cloud sharing software like Dropbox and Google Drive are so useful that one can accumulate many shared folders. That introduces a big problem: quickly finding the shared folder. The folder might not have a name that is easy to remember, or that is particularly discriminative. Some people loathe looking for information in these shared folders because it is so difficult to find the right folder.

Hookmark helps solve this problem. The setup is simple:

  1. Use Hookmark to copy a link to the shared folder, and
  2. paste or hook that link in a landmark location that is easy to find.

The landmark could be

  • a contact entry,
  • a key email,
  • a web page,
  • a project, or
  • somewhere on your local file system.

Finding the shared folder then becomes a two step process:

  1. find the landmark,
  2. navigate to folder from there (i.e., either by invoking Hookmark context window on the landmark, or clicking on the link that you’ve paste in the landmark).

You can also rename bookmarks in Hookmark to make the folder easy to find. Renaming a bookmark does not rename the linked item; so you don’t need to worry about affecting the information that others can see. Finding bookmarks got even easier in Hookmark 6 which boasts a bookmark window. Your query in this window can even include parts of the pathname of the target folder.

2

An additional option that I use all the time involves an app like Alfred or Raycast. In these apps, one can create a “quick link.” This approach allows me to use Hookmark to copy a folder or file location and tie that URI (is that the right term for Hookmark?) to a short typed string in the Alfred or Raycast command palettes. I have dozens and dozens of these and use them every day. For example, when I want to quickly navigate to a Google Sheet I use to track freelancing projects, I open the Raycast command palette, type “ssdocket” and the file opens in my browser.

3

Thanks for sharing this! It’s very timely because we @CogSci Apps are about to launch an ambassador program where we will be recruiting some Hookmark ambassadors for each app with which Hookmark integrates — Raycast is near the top of our list.

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