Remove descriptions from Opera bookmarks

I had posted on bookmarks in Opera from bookmark basics to killer bookmark techniques.

One of the aspects I hadn’t covered much is performance. Bookmarks are thoroughly indexed in Opera for awesome incremental search functionality. So large amount of them can cause noticeable performance issues.

One of the ways to shred some seconds of that processing is discarding descriptions.

What descriptions are

When you create bookmark in Opera it automagically picks up value of meta description key in the body of page. That data (there for search engines and such) is saved with bookmark in description field.

Problem is these descriptions can be useless and of considerable size in comparison to bookmark’s link and title.

How to remove descriptions

I had picked up the idea from Tamil’s awesome blog about Opera, that had recently revisited it with Linux script. He even provides small bookmarks remover app just for this.

Alternatively it can be done with command line and findstr like this:

findstr /V /L "DESCRIPTION=" bookmarks.adr > bookmarks-no-description.adr

In latter case don’t forget to have a backup of bookmarks file. You do have backups of all your data, right?

Overall

This tweak removed about 200KB off my bookmarks file. And reminded me I should be more active getting through those two thousands of links. :)