Raindrop: a beautiful all-in-one bookmark manager

There’re just too many stuffs out there.

It is nearly impossible for a human to remember everything that triggered a specific need at random time in our daily life. So we need all kinds of tools to save useful news to read later, funny images or video that our family may enjoy, inspiration that will help boosting our work, and so on. And not just only saving those in a messy way, we need to organize them in a clean and simple way so that we can access them easily anytime when we need them.

There has been a lot of great products that aim to satisfy this basic human need. Basic browser bookmarking tool, Instapaper, Readability, Pocket are all working hard to solve this problem. And now Raindrop is a good contender in this area that we should all know about.

Raindrop is a beautiful all-in-one bookmark manager that integrates auto-tagging, fast search, preview capture, drag and drop features. It is available as a web app, downloadable Mac and Windows app, iOS/Android app, and browser extension in Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera.

It is offered in both free and pro version. Pro version is $2/month ($19/year) with additional:

• Nested directories
• Suggested tags
• 1GB of new uploads each month
• Dropbox backup
• Priority support

You can view more about pricing information here.

Customization

Customization is where Raindrop shines among other bookmarking related apps. You can assign each folder and its nested folders (this is what Raindrop called it, but I prefer sub folder) an icon to personalize them. Raindrop will also automatically recommend related icon for you based on the name of the folder. For example, I created a folder named “Music” and Raindrop automatically assign one music related icon for me. If you’re not satisfied with the icon Raindrop suggested, you can always pick one from its 17 icon sets. Icon sets are collection of different style icons for users to use. It is great to have many different styles of icons to choose from, however, the UX here is somewhat too vague for users to grab the whole point in the first place. In this icon set window, the design should be clear, like providing a name for each icon set, instead just showing different icons. It should work as a category for different icon sets but now it does not offer it in a right way.

Honestly, customizing Raindrop is really fun and can take you hours if you have hundreds of sub folders to customize.

Collection

Collection is folders that save all your bookmarks and you can only create nested collection under Raindrop Pro. I would strongly suggest an upgrade since nested collection can really help you better organize bookmarks and ideas. If you wish to change an existed collection title on Raindrop, you need to double click it on the left panel to open up its description panel on the right, and then edit the title there. Actually this double click behavior is too cumbersome and not intuitive at all. In modern application design, a single click with a hold on the file name can trigger an edit. It is popular in every software we used everyday like Mac and Windows, and I think Raindrop should also embrace this.

As for creating nested collection, user needs to double click on the collection title to open up the description panel on the right, then click “nested collection” to create a nested collection folder. This is way too much complicated while adding a small “add icon” on the left of the collection title in the left panel can do the trick.

Suggestion

Raindrop has a browser extension for users to quickly adding bookmarks to its collection. The extension works just like Pocket, where one click to save the page and adding tags to organize them. Raindrop also support drag and drop items from webpage to the browser extension for fast saving. However, when you drag any item from a webpage to the Raindrop browser extension, there will be three large icons of image, link, and doc displayed. This is very disturbing since it suggests a behavior that we need to click on any of them to trigger the save. I think a simple discoloration of the extension window is enough to notify user that the item has been dragged in and will be saved. There’s really no need to add three big icons.

Furthermore, the third party integration of payment is no good. When user decide to upgrade, Raindrop will need you to enter your address, city, country, postal code, or phone number, which is completely unnecessary. As a web service, there’s not a valid reason for Raindrop to require your customers to provide the address, city, country, postal code, or phone number. So why bother to keep them? The most ridiculous thing is that you can randomly input fake information in the column like “N/A” and it will take it and proceed. Since there is no verification need at all, why bother to keep them in the process to drive your customer away?

Lastly, I think the difference between pro and free account is too weak. It would be better for Raindrop to include more meat for users to upgrade, such as IFTTT or Zapier integration.

Raindrop is now in 4.0 and in this release it has improvements in:

• Import now supports nested folders
• Parser has been improved, now more accurately parse articles and links
• Web app, desktop app and extension has been redesigned and now more customizable: font size, ability to change the size of the card, cover, hide or show the description of bookmarks and more
• Themes (including dark)
• Search is even smarter. It suggest filters depend on already entered criteria and current collection
• Nested collections now displayed as tree in sidebar
• 3-panel interface to read, view and edit bookmarks without losing context
• Favourite bookmarks
• Improved batch functions including ability to transfer multiple bookmarks at once
• Fixed many bugs of previous version
• Web App, Chrome, Firefox, Opera extension and Mac app has been updated.
• Finally Windows users can also take advantage of our application.

Raindrop is a great bookmarking tool that allows you to save all kinds of resources on the Internet including article, photo, video, presentation, web site screenshot, and access them on multiple devices. It is easy to use and able to import all your old bookmarks from browser, Pocket, Instapaper, and Readability so you don’t need to start over.

If you are interested, you can try Raindrop here.

ALSO: Read our original interactive review on images.