How To Manage Multiple Gmail Accounts

Many educators and people working in schools are in the position of having a personal gmail account and a work Google Apps account and keep accidentally logging in to the wrong one. This causes significant confusion for those that are new to using the system in my experience.

Many web browsers automatically log in if you tick ‘save password’ or ‘remember’. This can be a pain if you want to switch between two or more accounts. Managing multiple gmail accounts is a great solution…

Google Chrome allows you to have more than one instance of the browser logged in at any one time. This is especially useful if you want to switch between personal and work gmail accounts. Follow these steps:

1. Go to Chrome > Preferences (or go to  Settings on the top right of the Chrome browser window) and scroll down to see the area for ‘Users’.
2. Click ‘Add new user‘ and give it a name and choose an icon. At this point you can select to make it a managed user of the main account if you are signed in to Google Chrome. This basically enables all your bookmarks, apps, extensions, theme, and browser settings for the user to be synced to that account. You can skip signing in, which means that the settings will only be saved on the computer you are working on.
3. Now you will notice the icon for the user you are signed in to Chrome is at the top right corner of the Chrome browser window – thus enabling you to quickly and easily switch between different users.
4. Switch to the other user, log in to gmail (or Google Apps Mail) as that user and the next time you switch you can easily switch between the two accounts without confusion.

Here is a short 2.50min movie explaining this:

Bear in mind that bookmarks and settings are all kept within that instance of Chrome – ie. if you have separate work and personal bookmarks these will show in the instance of Chrome that they were created in!