Sort Files with Adobe Bridge

Adobe Bridge offers a far richer set of file-sorting options than your OS. They can often save time and help you cut through the clutter of a crowded folder so you can keep your attention on the project at hand.

Beyond simply displaying items sorted by file name or date, Bridge offers a literal menu of possibilities in the toolbar (Figure 1).

Some are more useful than others:

• Sort by Dimensions shows image files in order of pixel size. I find this more useful than Sort by Size, which looks only at the file size on disk.
• Sort by Color Profile separates CMYK and RGB files.
• Sort by Keywords may be useful, once in a while, but we’ll get to that shortly.
• Sort by Date Created and Sort by Date Modified are helpful when you need to find the earliest or latest iterations of a file. For images, it’s often important to know when you first made a file rather than when you last touched it with Photoshop.
• Sort by Rating and Sort by Label can be big time savers in big folders with large numbers of files, assuming you’ve rated or labeled the ones you are most interested in.
• Sort Manually is what it sounds like. You can sort your files in any way that makes sense for the project you are working on. Simply drag them around inside the window, and they’ll stay where you put them. (As a reminder, any time you drag a thumbnail to a new position in the Content window, Bridge switches to Sort Manually automatically.)

These choices don’t apply only to the folder you’re currently looking at. They are sticky until you change them.

From Taming Wild Assets with Adobe Bridge