Take Charge With Adobe Bridge

Cristen Gillespie

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One of the most frustrating tasks any photographer, artist, or designer faces is trying to find files they know they have somewhere on their drive, but can’t remember where they put them, what they named them, or when they created them in the first place. Adobe Bridge is packed with features designed to help users find their files as quickly and painlessly as possible, but of course, Bridge can only truly help if the user knows how to manage Bridge itself. In this article, I’ll tackle the basic interface, the first view that greets you when you launch Bridge, and show how to make it look and behave the way you want it to as your first step towards using Bridge efficiently when working with the images and documents used in your projects.

Bridge’s default workspace is called “Essentials.” It isn’t particularly efficient for most people to use, despite its name, because it clutters your workspace with almost every panel Bridge has. You’d be hard-pressed to make choices between images using the tiny Preview panel, and it’s doubtful you really need all the panels open when you’re only adding keywords, for example, or working with a collection of images to include in a project. By making custom workspaces, you can see more of what you want to see while taking care of the immediate task, and a lot less of what you don’t need to see at any given moment.

The Essentials Workspace

Establishing Interface Preferences

You first need to be aware that a few options for viewing your files aren’t found in the application window, but in Preferences (Adobe Bridge > Preferences on Mac or Edit > Preferences on Windows). On the General and Thumbnail panes, you can determine your interface brightness settings, highlight color, how large a file can be before Bridge won’t generate a thumbnail preview, and the information about a file that gets displayed.

For interface brightness (Preferences > General), choose one of the swatch icons, or use the sliders to adjust brightness independently for the panels and the thumbnail background for both the Content and Preview panels. This isn’t just an aesthetic preference. The brightness level for your interface not only influences your assessment of images, and can help you maintain a consistent environment in all your Adobe applications when viewing them, but it’s also a personal decision that can mitigate against visual fatigue. Depending upon your room lighting, a lighter or darker interface may be easier for you to look at your work for long periods. I do well with a medium gray, while others say they require a light interface to prevent eyestrain.

You can also choose your Accent (highlight) color when a file or keyword is targeted so that it jumps out at you quickly or recedes into the background. Ruby red or Amber yellow is noticeable if you want to see at a glance what you’ve highlighted, but you might prefer a more subdued shade of grey to minimize distractions when viewing your files.

Choose your preferred level of interface brightness and highlight color in General preferences

Viewing Data With Thumbnails

Switching to the Thumbnail pane, you’re first asked how large an image can be (in MB) before Bridge won’t take the time to generate a preview for it. The default is practical for most users, but if you often create files over a gigabyte in size, you might prefer seeing the thumbnail to getting quick previews of what might be mainly generic icons. If you don’t see a thumbnail for an image, be sure to check its file size before thinking Bridge is broken or your cache is corrupt. This preference could be the reason.

You have the choice to display data below your thumbnails, although Bridge limits you to only four choices (in addition to the filename) from the many types of data possible. The filename is always displayed with any other data, and an interesting oddity is that if you elect to view none of your four choices for additional data, you get two lines for your file name. However, if you choose to display even one line of additional data, you no longer get two lines and long filenames will be truncated to fit.

If it’s important you always see both an image’s color profile and its complete filename, don’t despair. Choose Color Profile as one of your lines of additional data, and enable “Show tooltips.” When you hover over a file, the full filename, along with some basic data, pops up in a large tooltip. This sometimes can get in the way, but when you really need more data than normally is visible, this is the way to go. If your lines of data suddenly disappear, you may have accidentally pressed Cmd-T/Ctrl-T, which is a toggle that allows you to temporarily view your thumbnails without the distraction of all that data. Folder names that aren’t too long to fit on one line (they’re never truncated) are superimposed in the middle of the folder icon, but all other data is hidden.

Thumbnail preferences allow you to choose which additional lines of metadata to display.

Using Multiple Workspaces

Once you’ve set your preferences for brightness and the general display of thumbnails and data, you can turn your attention to personalizing your workspaces. If you haven’t looked over what ships with Bridge, click on the triangle after the last visible name on the Application bar and select each of the workspaces in turn to get inspiration for the type of workspaces you will find useful. I am talking about workspaces in the plural because just one doesn’t really fit all tasks well. It’s very easy to switch workspaces or to open another instance of Bridge (Cmd-N/Ctrl-N) and use more than one workspace at the same time. Perhaps you need to collect files for a project into one location, and want to use a basic navigation workspace with small thumbnails for your source, but your destination folder is a Collection that you can display using the uncluttered Light Table workspace with large thumbnails. Bridge can accommodate that if you open two different instances of Bridge itself.

Opening separate instances of Bridge allows you to use more than one workspace at a time.

While Bridge doesn’t yet allow us to customize our keyboard shortcuts, it does automatically assign F1–F6 (while pressing Cmd/Ctrl or, if necessary, the fn key) to the first six workspaces in its list. Your custom workspaces are placed by default at the top of the list. Changing the order of the workspaces, and therefore their keyboard shortcut, is a bit fiddly, but it is possible: Open your window wide enough to see all the workspaces you want to rearrange in the Application bar; grab the vertical dots before the first workspace and drag it to the left to make more of the list visible if necessary; then simply drag the names of the workspaces into any order you like to ensure your favorite workspaces get a keyboard shortcut.

The keyboard shortcuts are important to get used to for your frequently-used workspaces, in part because you may often want to keep your Bridge windows small and the list of names quickly begins to scroll out of sight. Unless you’re comfortable always clicking on a menu, then selecting from it after it opens, it’s simply easier and quicker to remember that Cmd-F1/Ctrl-F1 is your navigation setup, Cmd-F2/Ctrl-F2 is your preview setup, etc.

Bridge’s built-in keyboard shortcuts for workspaces

Adjusting the Panels

Switch to the Essentials workspace to follow along with creating custom workspace based on it. If you’ve already used the Essentials workspace, you may have modified it from the default view. Any time you alter a workspace, even if you only make your thumbnails larger, change the Sort order, or bring a tab to the front, Bridge assumes you want to keep working with the changes you made and saves the current setup so you don’t have to save a new workspace. In order to get back to the original saved state, Cmd-click/Ctrl-click on the Workspace name (if you have more than one Workspace name showing), or open the Workspace menu and choose Reset Workspace. Choose Reset Standard Workspaces to restore the default workspaces to their original condition.

You’re allowed three columns for your panels in a tabbed view, but you don’t need to use them all. Hover your cursor over the middle (Content) panel’s right edge. When the cursor changes to the double-sided arrow, grab the vertical divider and drag it to the right. If you drag to the edge of the window, you’ll create a workspace with only two columns. When you drag the divider back to the left, that third column is accessible again. The Light Table workspace was created by closing the right and left columns, leaving only the center Content panel visible. You can drag on its vertical dividers to reopen the panels in order to see that it’s just a variation on the Essentials workspace.

Dragging the vertical divider allows you to change between two- and three-column views

Each column can be divided into as many rows as there are panels to fill them. I find there’s a practical limit, though, since it’s often easier to switch between tabs in a row than to scroll in the panels themselves. Most of what you’ll be dealing with in these panels are lists of things, whether folders or files, metadata or keywords, so the length of a panel is often more important than its width. Columns have row dividers that are similar to the vertical dividers. Hover between two rows and drag up or down to increase/decrease the length of a panel. You won’t close a row by dragging as far to the top or bottom as possible, though. The tabs in that row will always stay visible. Further, clicking back on a “minimized” tab won’t open that panel for you; you’ll have to drag on the divider to open the panel again.

Drag the divider up or down to increase or decrease the length of a panel.

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