A Bookmark is a saved representation of a specific spot in space. They are used for a variety of purposes.
You can create your own bookmarks, organise them into folders (and subfolders), and share them with others.
Bookmarks are accessed using the Locations window (in the Personal section of the Neocom).
Within the Locations window, the first "folder" will be for locations in your current system. You can detach this with Open in Window and keep it separate in your standard window layout.
Unfortunately it is not possible to assign a shortcut for aligning or warping to a bookmark.
While you can use a bookmark for almost anything, there are several common scenarios for which bookmarks are widely used.
A safespot is a bookmark that is designed to be hard to find a ship or fleet at. They are places to warp to if you don't want to be caught, though it is important to remember that there are limitations to their safety.
Safespots should not be on grid with anything that other players can warp to ("celestials" such as gates, stations, belts, moons etc.)
Ideally they should not be directly between two celestials; if they are then you might briefly pop up on another player's overview as they warp past you.
It is also best if they are at least 15 AU away from the nearest celestial so that you are outside the range of the directional scanner, though this is not always possible.
Being cloaked a few tens of km from a safespot is generally very safe (though there are devices in nullsec sov space that can decloak you after a while); cloaking at the safespot is only vulnerable if the bookmark itself is compromised.
If you are not cloaked then you can be probed down with combat probes. If there are combat probers in system then you will need to bounce between multiple safespots, or at least remain aligned out.
Sometimes when you warp to a station you don't land at 0km and have to move before you can dock, giving enemies a chance to catch and kill you. To avoid this you can create a quickdock bookmark that is at 0km, and warp to that instead. The bookmark should be further away from the station structure than the radius of your largest ship, so that you don't collide with it when you land and bounce off.
When warping to a quickdock you can also set your autopilot destination to the station it is at, and activate autopilot once you are in warp. As soon as you land at the bookmark, autopilot will then request docking permission and you will dock automatically. Do NOT activate autopilot before you warp; if you do you will warp to the station itself rather than your bookmark, which may not be at 0.
You might sometimes have similar "at zero" bookmarks for stargates.
While quickdock bookmarks dock at a station more safely, undock bookmarks (aka "insta undock" or just "insta") allow you to undock more safely. They rely on the fact that when you undock you are already moving, and are invulnerable (unlockable) until you change your speed or direction. If there is something directly ahead of you as you undock then you are already aligned to it, and will enter warp immediately from your invulnerable state.
Note that when undocking you will not be perfectly aligned to your bookmark because there is some randomness in the direction, but the randomness will be centered on a specific direction, and it is that direction that your undock bookmark should be in.
Undock bookmarks need to be at least 150km from the station, and should ideally be hundreds of km away.
Gate ping bookmarks are used to avoid warping directly to a gate. This is essential in nullsec (and w-space + Pochven) where warp disruption bubbles are possible, but can also be valueable anywhere that you might want to avoid a gate camp. With the introduction of pirate insurgencies you can now have bubbles on lowsec gates in systems at corruption level 5.
Rather than warping directly to the gate, you warp to the gate ping bookmark, and then only warp to and jump through the gate if you can see it is clear.
A gate ping bookmark should be on the same grid as the gate itself, but at least 500km away from the gate so that you are not affected by bubbles on the gate. Ideally they should be above, below or behind the gate.
For particularly dangerous gates it might be advisable to have multiple pings.
Sometimes it is very useful to be able to warp yourself or your fleet around a combat grid, repositioning yourself for maximum advantage. In order to do this you need a lot of bookmarks on the grid.
It takes a lot of time to set up these grid ping bookmarks, so it is generally only worth it on grids that you are likely to be fighting at, such as structures that you will be fighting over.
Because wormholes are ephemeral, it is generally necessary to bookmark them once you have probed them down. Wormhole bookmarks should have a 3 day expiry, because the wormhole itself never lasts longer than this.
You can bookmark wrecks and cargo canisters in space, allowing you to return later to collect any contents that remain.
To create a bookmark, use the Add Location button in the locations window or the Save Location shortcut key.
Bookmarks can have an expiry time set, which is useful if the bookmark is to something that won't exist forever, or when creating intermediate bookmarks that only exist to make it easier to create others.
You can put bookmarks into folders to organise them, and you can also share bookmark folders with others.
Because safe spots shouldn't be on a direct line between 2 celestials, you will need an intermediate bookmark to create them.
First, pick 2 celestials that are a good distance apart, warp from one to the other (at 100km), and create a temporary bookmark while you are in warp roughly half way between them.
Next, warp to that temporary bookmark, and from there warp to another distant celestial (again at 100km). Once again, create a bookmark while in warp roughly half way to the destination. This new bookmark will be your safe spot, as it will not be on a direct line between any two celestials.
Try to select celestials, and drop the bookmarks, in such a way as to maximise the distance from the safespot bookmark to any celestial.
To make undock bookmarks for Minmatar stations, undock in a fast ship (frigate with MWD, an interceptor or maybe a 50MN MWD Punisher) and stop immediately - dock back up if there are hostiles on grid that could catch you. Make sure your tactical overlay is on, rotate and zoom your view so that the distance numbers are in front of you and double click in space exactly on the intersection of the plane of the overlay and the distance numbers. Turn on your MWD, drop a bookmark once you pass 150km, then keep going and drop another when you are comfortably far away; that first 150km bookmark can then be deleted.
To make undock bookmarks for Amarr stations, again undock in a fast ship, but this time move as close to directly down as possible.
It can be helpful to have a cloak equipped on a bookmarking ship; if a hostile lands on grid, you can then cloak up rather than warp off, and then decloak and continue burning out after they leave.
The simplest (though not best) way to make a gate ping is to warp to the gate at 100km, and create a bookmark as you are landing. This does, however, create the ping on a direct line to the gate from whatever you warped from, which is not idea.
Another option is to use a fast ship to burn away from the gate and drop the bookmark when you are several hundred km away from it. This approach allows you to precisely control the location of the bookmark, but puts you at more risk when making it. Note that after making your bookmark you should continue moving for a good distance so that anyone watching cannot tell where you dropped it. A good option for this kind of ping is to make it directly up or down from the gate, which minimises the chance that someone will put a bubble between the gate and your bookmark.
There are numerous techniques for making grid pings, but the general idea is to fill the space around a structure with regularly-spaced bookmarks in all directions.
Ideally, you want a ship that is as fast as possible with MWD running and cap stable, and can warp cloaked. Having a probe launcher is a bonus. A Cheetah covert ops frigate is a good choice; with the right fit it can do 850m/s while cloaked, and over 4k/s on MWD. The 50MN MWD Punisher is super fast (9km/sec sustained), but can't warp cloaked.
The first few bookmarks will have to be made by either dropping a bookmark while warping onto or off the grid, or by burning on MWD. One approach is to start with "up", "down", "north", "south", "east" and "west" outer bookmarks, all at over 1000km from the structure.
Another tactic is to burn a certain distance from the structure in one direction, then select "orbit at current distance" on the structure and drop a bookmark every minute or so on that orbit. You can also drop a canister and orbit that instead of the structure.
Once you have a good spread of initial bookmarks around the structure, you can generally fill in gaps by warping while cloaked between the existing bookmarks. For example, if you have the 6 outer bookmarks mentioned above, you can warp from each of those to the structure at 100 to give you an inner set. You can then warp from each of the outer BMs to the corresponding inner one, again at 100km, to give a second layer of bookmarks.
It is also technically possible to launch a set of probes and move them in towards each other close enough that they all appear on grid with you. If you can do this then you can bookmark the probes to form an initial distant shell of bookmarks.
The more bookmarks you have on the grid, the easier it becomes to create new ones in the right places to fill any gaps.
When you create a bookmarks folder you can select between a Personal folder or a Shared folder. A shared folder, as the name suggests, allows you to share bookmarks with others.
Shared folders can be either online or offline; you can only have a small number of online shared folders, but as many offline ones as you like. You cannot see the bookmarks in offline folders, so you may need to offline a different one to online the one you need at any particular time.
When you create a shared folder you need to select access control lists to specify who can use or manage the bookmarks in the folder. Note that the ACL can be modified after the folder is created. As an alternative to the ACL you can also select your own corporation.
You can drag a shared folder into a chat window, or an eve mail.
It is also possible to add a shared folder to a chat MOTD; to do this, first drag it into a note in the in-game Notepad, and you can then drag it from there into the MOTD editor in the Channel Configuration.