Selecting Panels for a Task
Control-click/right-click on any of the tabs in the Essentials workspace to access a list of all the panels you can place in your workspace. If you close a panel you seldom use and later want access to it, here’s where you’ll quickly find it. A closed panel is added to the set of tabs you just context-clicked on. (Of course, the panels are also listed in the Window menu.) The only panel you won’t see in the Essentials workspace is the Inspector panel. That’s useful for people who access their files from a remote Digital Asset Management (DAM) server. For example, if your company uses Adobe Drive (or the earlier Version Cue), you’ll use the Inspector panel to aid with viewing and working with server files. If you’re not using a server, you can ignore this panel.
Think about the tasks you frequently perform with your files. You’ll probably use Bridge most often as a file browser, so that task could be emphasized in your first custom workspace. Beyond the Content panel, you’ll want at least the Folders panel or the Favorites panel for navigating your drive(s). I rarely navigate using the Folders panel, but prefer to use a combination of my list of Favorites and the breadcrumbs trail found on the Path bar. While the Folders panel is the familiar directory tree view which you may feel most comfortable with, adding and removing files and folders in your Favorites panel is so easy you can add temporary aliases for current projects, as well as list drives and folders you constantly use.
Control-click/right-click on any folder or file to choose Add to Favorites from the context menu. Drag file and folder icons into any order that organizes them for you, such as putting temporary files at the bottom and unchanging hard drives at the top. To remove a file or folder, Control-click/right-click on its name in the panel and choose Remove From Favorites. You can guess by now that context-sensitive menus are very useful in Bridge.
By using the slider at the bottom of the window to shrink and enlarge your thumbnails, you should be able to easily select your files without needing the Preview panel, giving you more room for the Content panel. However, even if you’re only selecting a file to drag into Photoshop or another application, you still may want to be able to view that file’s metadata or filter on one of its attributes (label, rating, keywords, etc.), in order to narrow your choice between, say, very similar images or different versions of the same document. By keeping the Metadata and Filter panels in your browsing workspace, you’ll always have quick access to that extra information, although if you usually prefer to use the Details list view, (chosen from the bottom right of the window), you may not need the Metadata panel open for basic browsing tasks.
The Content panel displying thumbnails, ratings, and other metadata for images.
Save and Delete Workspaces
Close any panels you don’t think you’ll need on a regular basis for simple browsing. Getting rid of unnecessary distraction and clutter will make working with Bridge much more pleasant. If you’re like most folks, you’ll have to experiment with your workspaces until you hit on those that work best for you, but as you can see, it’s easy to do. Saving and later deleting workspaces is very easy, too. When you have the panels displayed and positioned as you want them for your new browsing workspace, click on the down-pointing triangle next to the workspace names and choose New Workspace. The dialog box that opens asks you for a name and gives you the option to save where the workspace appears on your monitor and whether or not you want to save the sort order. You might always want your workspace to pop up in the upper left of your monitor, or to use the Date Modified sort order. Remember that no matter what you do with the window position or sort order, you can get your saved workspace back with Reset Workspace.
To delete a workspace, just switch to another, then select the one you want to delete (custom workspaces only) from the list in the Delete Workspace dialog box. If you modify a workspace and want to replace a workspace with your modified version, name a new workspace with exactly the same name as the one you’re replacing and Bridge will let you overwrite the original workspace.
The New Workspace and Delete Workspace dialog boxes
Customize a Second Workspace
Another workspace you’ll probably want to create (especially if you’re a photographer or a designer who has to choose one image from among many), is one that makes previewing easy. The Essentials workspace includes a tiny Preview panel. The Filmstrip workspace that ships with Bridge offers a larger Pre
view window, but restricts the height of the preview by placing the Content panel in the same column—nice and compact if you’re mainly previewing video footage, but not very useful for many still images, PDFs, or InDesign documents. The Preview workspace keeps your navigation and filtering panels in the far left column and uses a wide column on the right running the full length of the window, giving more space for comparing up to nine images at once, but that workspace can still be improved upon. To minimize how much I have to modify in a workspace, I usually start a new, custom workspace by modifying my first custom workspace with its left-column navigation panels, rather than using one of Bridge’s standard workspaces. This also ensures that most of my workspace is always familiar, and I only change what has to be changed for a different task.
For my Preview workspace, since I resize my Bridge windows often, I have found it works better to place the Preview panel in the center column with the Content panel on the far right. The thumbnail size slider at the bottom of the window only affects the size of the thumbnails in the Content panel. The way to affect the size allotted to an image you’re previewing is to make the Preview panel larger (or smaller). However, if you grab the corner of the window to resize the panel, Bridge first resizes the center column before resizing the outer two. I have no desire to see multiple columns of thumbnails when trying to enlarge my preview, which is what happens if your Content panel is in the center column. Of course, you can always drag on column dividers to resize them, but when you’re trying to make your preview area larger or smaller as you work, it’s quicker to resize the entire Bridge window than to constantly adjust the columns individually.
A customized, Superpreview workspace
Dual Monitor Setups
For those of you with dual monitor setups, Bridge offers an even better preview option, one that takes advantage of using two monitors. After you’ve opened whatever workspace you need for the main task at hand, whether navigating, adding keywords or other metadata, etc., choose Window > New Synchronized Window (Cmd-Opt-N/Ctrl-Alt-N) For the second window that opens, you could choose your Preview workspace with the Preview panel in the center, close the panels to the right and left of it, then drag this workspace to another monitor. Every time you click on a thumbnail (or up to nine thumbnails) on your main monitor, you’ll see it previewed on your secondary monitor. However, if you want this workspace to persist session to session and have Bridge open both your browsing workspace and the Preview panel, you’ll have to instead modify your navigation workspace in the second window so it shows only the Preview panel, keeping what amounts to two different views of the same workspace. Bridge can’t “remember” two separate workspaces when it creates synchronized windows.
The window identification at the top displays the folder you’re in, but also note the number 2:2 in the second window, indicating you have two windows open and that this is the second of those two windows. There is nothing except the amount of RAM your system has and how much visual clutter you can stand (or how many monitors you have) to prevent you from synchronizing more than two windows. Since I don’t have a dual monitor setup, I can only show you below what it looks like on a single monitor (and yes, if you like you can synchronize windows on just one monitor). Note you can’t actually save this setup as a new workspace, but if you quit (exit) Bridge through the File Menu (don’t close a window using the X button), your main window and the synchronized window will both reopen the next time you launch Bridge. You’ve sort of “tricked” Bridge into opening one workspace twice because it doesn’t see the second window as a separate instance of Bridge as it does when you use Cmd-N/Ctrl-N.
This article has barely scratched the surface of how Bridge can make some of your routine tasks a bit more pleasant, saving you more time to be creative. With its ability to remember on-the-fly changes to your workspace from session to session, to save and quickly recall a few custom workspaces, and to open as many instances of Bridge as you can handle, whether to synchronize your workspace on multiple monitors or to use different workspaces on just one monitor, Bridge provides workspace options for performing all sorts of tasks. A few minutes spent thinking about the tasks you routinely perform, and then creating a couple workspaces to help you get at the tools you need without having to first wade through the clutter, is a good start to putting you in charge of Bridge.
Update Regarding Adobe Bridge CC
Those of you who have already updated to Adobe Bridge CC (Creative Cloud), may have noticed a few Workspace changes since this article was written for Bridge CS6. The first change was the elimination of the Output Module workspace. For those of you who have missed it, the Output module is back as a plugin to the latest version of Bridge CC, along with instructions for installing it. You must go to the Bridge CC Online Help, and you must have the latest version of Bridge CC installed, but the directions are pretty straightforward from there. The Export Module has also been removed. The Creative Cloud is developing access to social media through Behance and Adobe Revel, so you may want to investigate these outlets in place of using the Export Module. Photoshop.com has been discontinued. Finally, for photographers who have used New Synchronized Window to work with dual monitor setups, as described in this article, I’m sorry to say that Bridge no longer offers this feature, either.
This article was last modified on December 14, 2022
This article was first published on March 25, 2013
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