Edge Collections Gone: What You Can Still Get Back

Microsoft Edge had a feature called Collections. It was the panel on the right where you dragged pages, images and typed notes into named groups, separate from your Favorites. Microsoft removed it in Edge 149 on June 4, 2026. If you opened Edge one morning and the Collections button, the panel and the keyboard shortcut had all stopped existing, that is what happened. Nothing you did caused it.

The removal notice is short and it leaves out the part that matters. Your data was not deleted. On the PC this was written on, Edge 153 still has a folder called Collections inside the browser profile. Inside it is the database Edge used for every collection, every saved page and the order you kept them in. This PC never used the feature, so the file here is empty, but people in Microsoft’s own forum who did use it opened theirs after the update and found the data intact. The panel is gone. The file is not.

So this post does three things. It says exactly what Microsoft removed and when, so you can stop wondering whether it is coming back. It gives you the two recovery routes that work today. One is for personal accounts and takes a minute. The other reads the database directly and turns it into a bookmarks file any browser can import. And it is honest about what is not coming back, and about where to put the next thing you save so this cannot happen twice.

What Microsoft removed, and when

Collections launched in 2020 as Edge’s answer to the pile of open tabs. You clicked the plus in the top right, or pressed Ctrl+Shift+Y, and a panel slid in where you could drop the current page, a dragged image or a typed note into a named collection. It kept a card for each page with a thumbnail and the page’s title, it synced across your devices, and you could send a whole collection to Word or Excel in one click. It was one of the few things Edge did that Chrome did not.

Then it was wound down in two steps. Microsoft’s support page gives both. From Edge 145, you could no longer add new pages to a collection, though existing collections and their items were still there to open. From Edge 149, released June 4, 2026, Collections is no longer available at all. The button, the panel and the shortcut went in that update.

The same page names the two off-ramps. Personal Microsoft accounts, the kind you sign into Outlook.com or Windows with, were pointed at Bing Saves, and can still see their old collections there. Work and school accounts got an export option in the Collections pane, for backup or offline use, while the pane still existed. If you were on a work account and did not export before June, that route is closed.

There was also a one-click move to Favorites, offered while the feature was winding down. It converted each collection into a folder under Favorites and carried the pages across. Microsoft’s own wording is that only saved web pages were moved, and that images, notes and other non-page items were not included. So the notes you typed under a link, which were a big part of the reason to use Collections rather than a Favorites folder, were never going to survive the move to Favorites.

Why “gone” feels like a bug

Two things make this read as a fault rather than a decision. Microsoft’s support page kept its old title and still ranks on the first page of Google for this search, fifth when we checked in mid-September, so a search sends you to a document describing a panel you cannot open. And the data is still on your disk, so anyone who goes looking finds it and reasonably concludes that the feature must be switched off somewhere in Settings. It is not. There is no setting that brings it back. Microsoft’s page says the feature is no longer available, not that it is switched off.

Where you are seeing this

If you are not sure whether this is what happened to you, check four things.

• The plus icon at the top right of Edge is gone, and Ctrl+Shift+Y does nothing. On Edge 148 and earlier that shortcut opened the Collections panel.
• Settings and more (the three dots) has no Collections entry. On older versions it had its own entry in that menu.
• edge://settings/help shows version 149 or higher. On this PC it reads 153. If it shows 145 to 148, your collections are still viewable, and today is the day to move them.
• Your Favorites are intact. Collections and Favorites were always two separate features with two separate stores. If your Favorites bar has gone blank as well, that is a different problem, and the Edge Favorites recovery guide covers it.

If all four match, the feature is gone, your data is probably not, and the next two sections are the recovery.

Route 1: Bing Saves, if you signed in with a personal account

This is the fast route and it only works for personal Microsoft accounts. Open bing.com/saves and sign in with the same account Edge was signed into. Your collections should be listed, each with its pages, because Edge had been syncing them to your Microsoft account all along, and Bing Saves shows that synced copy. A user in Microsoft’s own Q&A forum who lost every collection in the 149 update found the data still there.

Two limits. Bing Saves has no export, so what you get is a web page you can look at, not a file you can keep. And it is another Microsoft product with the same terms as the one that just retired, which is worth sitting with for a second before you treat it as the new home. Microsoft moved your saves from a feature it switched off into a feature it could switch off, and gave you no button to take them anywhere else.

If the collections are there, the way to get them out by hand is to open each page and save it into Favorites with Ctrl+Shift+D. That works for a dozen pages. For a few hundred, it is the reason the next route exists.

Route 2: The database still on your disk

Every Edge profile keeps its Collections in a small SQLite database, and the 149 update removed the panel without removing the file. On Windows the path is

%LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Edge\User Data\Default\Collections\collectionsSQLite

Paste that first part, up to Collections, into the File Explorer address bar and it opens the folder. If you used more than one Edge profile there is a Profile 1, Profile 2 folder beside Default, each with its own Collections folder.

I opened the one on this PC to check what is in it rather than repeat what a forum said. It has ten tables. The three that matter are collections, which holds each collection’s title and position, items, which holds each saved thing with its title, a source field that holds the page URL inside a small JSON blob, a text_content field, an html_content field and a type, and collections_items_relationship, which says which item sits in which collection and at what position. There is also a comments table and a pair of _sync tables with server IDs, which fits Bing Saves reading the same synced store. On this machine the file was last written in April 2025 and Edge 153 had left it exactly where it was.

Two ways to read it. If you are comfortable with a database tool, DB Browser for SQLite is free, opens the file directly, and a three-table join in the Microsoft Q&A thread above prints every page with its collection name. A reader of that thread confirmed it worked on their file. If you would rather have a bookmarks file you can import, the script below does that.

Before you run anything

Close Edge fully, then copy collectionsSQLite to your Desktop and work on the copy. A running browser can hold the file open, and you want the original untouched whatever happens. The script opens the copy read-only.

Copy this script

Save it as collections_to_html.py next to the copied database. It needs Python 3, which is free from python.org, and nothing else.

import json, sqlite3, html, sys

src = sys.argv[1] if len(sys.argv) > 1 else "collectionsSQLite"
db = sqlite3.connect("file:" + src + "?mode=ro", uri=True)

rows = db.execute("""
  SELECT c.title, i.title, i.source, i.date_created
  FROM collections c
  JOIN collections_items_relationship r ON r.parent_id = c.id
  JOIN items i ON i.id = r.item_id
  WHERE COALESCE(c.is_marked_for_deletion, 0) = 0
    AND COALESCE(i.is_marked_for_deletion, 0) = 0
  ORDER BY c.position, r.position
""").fetchall()

def url_of(source):
    try:
        return json.loads(source).get("url", "")
    except Exception:
        return source if str(source).startswith("http") else ""

out = ["<!DOCTYPE NETSCAPE-Bookmark-file-1>", "<TITLE>Bookmarks</TITLE>",
       "<H1>Bookmarks</H1>", "<DL><p>"]
folder = None
for coll, title, source, created in rows:
    url = url_of(source)
    if not url:
        continue
    if coll != folder:
        if folder is not None:
            out.append("    </DL><p>")
        out.append("    <DT><H3>%s</H3>" % html.escape(coll or "Collection"))
        out.append("    <DL><p>")
        folder = coll
    out.append('        <DT><A HREF="%s">%s</A>'
               % (html.escape(url, quote=True), html.escape(title or url)))
if folder is not None:
    out.append("    </DL><p>")
out.append("</DL><p>")

open("edge-collections.html", "w", encoding="utf-8").write("\n".join(out))
kept = sum(1 for r in rows if url_of(r[2]))
print("wrote edge-collections.html with", kept, "links")

Then, in a terminal opened on the Desktop:

python collections_to_html.py collectionsSQLite

It prints a count and writes edge-collections.html. That is the same bookmarks file format every browser’s import expects, with one folder per collection and the pages in the order you had them. Items that were not pages, a typed note or a dragged image, are skipped, because a bookmarks file has nowhere to put them. So is anything you had deleted before the update, which Edge keeps in the file as a row marked for deletion rather than removing it. I ran it against a database built with the exact table layout from this PC’s file, including a collection title with angle brackets and a URL with an ampersand, and both came through escaped correctly.

Import the file

In Edge, open edge://favorites, click the three-dot menu at the top right, choose Import favorites, then Favorites or bookmarks HTML file, and pick edge-collections.html. Your collections arrive as folders. Chrome takes the same file at chrome://bookmarks, and moving bookmarks between browsers covers the duplicates trap if you import it somewhere that already has some of the same links. Or do not import it at all, and keep the file as the backup Collections never had.

Route 3: The Favorites folder, if you moved them in time

If you clicked the “Move to Favorites” offer while Edge still had the panel, your collections are already folders under Favorites, and there is nothing to recover. Open edge://favorites and look for folders named after your old collections. Each holds the pages as ordinary links.

Look at them with the right expectation. A Favorites entry is a title and an address. The page card, the thumbnail and any note you typed under the link did not make the trip, because Microsoft’s migration carried only the URLs. If a link now points at a page that has since moved or been taken down, the folder holds nothing of what the page said, which is the difference between saving a link and saving a page, and it is the reason an old bookmark folder slowly stops working.

What is not coming back

Be honest with yourself about this part before you spend an evening on it.

Saved pages come back. Through Bing Saves on a personal account, through the database on any account, or through the Favorites folders if you moved them. All three routes agree on the pages.

Images are unlikely to. A dragged image in Collections was an item like a page was, and the items table has a type column that tells them apart. The same table has canonical_image_data and canonical_image_url columns, so an image’s source address may be in there, but the supported migration dropped images and the bookmarks-file route above has nowhere to put one. If you need an image back, DB Browser for SQLite and the items table is the place to look, row by row.

Notes are the real loss, and the least certain. A typed note was an item too, and the items table carries a text_content column and a type column, so a note’s text may well be sitting in its own row. I could not test that, because the database on this PC has no notes in it, and I am not going to tell you it works on the strength of a column name. What I can tell you is that Microsoft’s own migration path drops them, Bing Saves does not export them, and the database is the most likely place they still are. Open it, sort items by type, and read the rows whose source has no URL.

The feature itself is not coming back. There is a free, open-source extension called Collections Plus that rebuilds the panel inside Edge and Chrome and can import the collectionsSQLite file directly, thumbnails included. If what you miss is the panel, that is the closest thing to it. Read the rest of this before you decide it is where the next six years of saves should go.

What to save into now

The lesson of this year is not that Microsoft did something unusual. Google removed the button that opened Chrome’s reading list in 2024. Pocket shut down in 2025. Every browser feature you save into is a feature its maker can retire, and when they do, the export button covers exactly the parts they chose to make portable. Collections held pages, images and notes for six years, and the move to Favorites carried one of the three. Social saves work the same way, and the fix is the same too.

So the question is not which browser feature to switch to. It is where to put things so that the next retirement is somebody else’s problem.

ContextBolt is built for that job, and it is ours, so weigh the bias. It is a Chrome extension, and Edge installs Chrome Web Store extensions, so it runs in the browser you are already in. Open any page, click the icon, click Save this page, and it keeps the page’s text along with the link, so the entry still reads after the address stops working. It tags each save and sorts it into topics on arrival, the way Collections grouped things, except you do not have to do the dragging. Your X, Reddit and LinkedIn saves are captured as you make them, into the same library, which is the half of your saving that no browser feature sees. And search is instant and runs on your device, over the text of the page rather than the title the site gave it.

Basic is free, needs no account, and is capped at 150 bookmarks. Pro is $6 a month, removes the cap, adds cloud sync, and adds an MCP endpoint so Claude or Cursor can search the whole collection by meaning mid-conversation.

It does not import the Collections database, so it starts from your next save rather than your last six years. Use the script above for the old ones. Then, the next time a page deserves keeping, save it somewhere that keeps the page and is not a line item in a browser roadmap. Basic is the place to start.

The honest take

If you came here to find out whether your collections are gone, the answer is that the panel is gone and the data is not. Check bing.com/saves if you used a personal account. Copy the database out of your profile folder either way, today, before a future Edge release decides the folder is clutter. Microsoft’s own page says the feature will be “fully removed in a future release”, and nobody has said what that means for the file.

The uncomfortable part is what the removal revealed. For six years the panel was your window onto your own saves, and when Microsoft closed the window the saves were still there, on your own disk, in a format any free tool can read. “Gone” was never a fact about your data. It was a decision about what you were allowed to see of it. The same is true of Bing Saves, which shows you the collections and offers no way to take them anywhere. Run the script, keep the file, and put the next thing you save somewhere that the file is yours from the start.