How To Use Adobe Bride To Review Wedding Photos?

One of the things I love about Bridge is the CMD-L key. This is a full-screen view of the image. If you don’t do anything, it’s just a slide show. But the real power is you can left/right arrow to advance back and forth, use the mouse scroll wheel to zoom in and out to 100% or more, hit the 1-5 keys to apply stars and 6-9 to apply color labels and verify quickly run through a folder of images, check for critical detail, mark it as a keeper, and when you’re done and return from slide show mode, you then can filter on just your 5 star images or your red labels to work on.

I have been using Bridge for months now and completely agree. An added feature is that if you want to use Lightroom CC (not Lightroom Classic) you can easily invoke that as well. I find this helpful if I want to start editing on my computer but for some reason need to edit on a tablet o\\r phone later. Bridge really was key in helping me move on from Lightroom Classic, and sped up my workflow dramatically.

Anthony, I love your website and your enthusiasm. I use Bridge to add all my essential IPTC and XMP metadata to my files, plus all my basic presets for different lenses, edit all the images via ACR and only then import all the edited Raw files into Lightroom for exporting using a range of presets. It’s brilliant at this and, in my view, much easier to edit in ACR rather than Lightroom. Keep up the good work!

Awesome article, I learned quite a few things that I will definitely use. I don’t understand the cynicism of people calling this a “click bait”. I am sure lot of time and effort went into making a article like this. If you already know what’s explained here, it does not mean others do as well. So let’s try to keep comments in a positive tone.

I like the filter option in Bridge, cause it allows you to sort by the Crop, Orientation, and also Aspect Ratio. In Lightroom, filter metadata at the top filter guide options, will only let me filter by orientation, Landscape, or Portrait. I haven’t been able to find any way to add aspect ratio to LR filter. its simple to do in bridge. as I am editing action sports shot I will crop at various size, then export them by there size, Bridge makes it easy to do this when I am done .

I am a long time LrC user. To make a long story short I have used Bridge to cull my last month’s image shoots. I find that it is slower than LrC, particularly when trying assign stars to an image. I have to wait for the final preview to resolve before the star will “take”. I tried assigning a few key words, but I need to work there more. It would be great if you could do a article re adding keywords, filtering by keywords etc. An example with a few keywords would be easier for you, but I’d like to see a more realistic demo with a few thousand keywords. Thanks

I use Bridge all the time as an image manager with Photoshop as my image editor. Bridge is easier and much more straightforward than Lightroom. The ONLY complaint I have about Bridge is that when you’re doing a search, it does a brute force inspection of every image which, if searching a 100 GB library of images, can take a very long time. LR uses a precompiled database of significant words (keywords, filenames, etc.) and so its search function is blazing fast compared to Bridge. Not only that, but the search function in Bridge is much more sophisticated then that of LR. You can search for multiple words, ratings, keywords etc. I use LR only for its fast search capability. It uses a ton of disk space but I feel it’s worth it for those lightning fast searches. If Bridge had a similar search capability I would uninstall LR right away. I much prefer Photoshop for image editing. I would really enjoy a article comparing the functionality of these two Adobe programs for keyword management and searching. By the way, you’re apparently living in Buffalo NY. I’m originally from Buffalo too and had a friend in high school named James Morgante. Any relation?

Anthony — Nice article and enjoyed it a lot….. Been following you for a number of years… ….. Just one thought. I noticed that you said, and yes it is true… The edits in Bridge can be seen in Photoshop as well as Lightroom BUT, please emphasize that images should not be “moved” around in bridge which are also in Lightroom, for as I remember, the “Location” will be disconnected in the catalog…. and the user will wonder where the image ‘went to’ ?? Just a thought ……. At least that is the way I remember it. ……… PS – Thanks for all your hard work.

I use both Bridge and LR. Often use Bridge for initial look. Also, for travel I use a PC with only Bridge and PS because the PC isn’t powerful enough for LR. One question though. I sometimes used two or even three instances of Bridge for comparing folders and moving files before LR import, but it seems like Adobe has disabled the option of running more than one instance of Bridge in the latest version. Anyone found a way to run two instances of the latest Bridge?

I use Bridge to sort, organise and view images before editing them in Photoshop, but I also use it as a vastly more powerful and flexible replacement for Finder. (On my Macs. It will also.serve this function on Windows machines, but I can’t remember what the Windows equivalent of Finder is called.) It works on all the folders on your computer, and handles every kind of file: Word documents, spreadsheets, PDFs, articles, everything. For instance, double click on a Word file, and Bridge opens the document in Word. Right click and it offers an “Open With” function that’s useful if you use more that one program for certain kinds of files. You can sort files by type, by size, by creation or modification date, etc, etc. Right click on a file and you can Send or Copy it to any other folder on the computer. (Finder can’t do this, I think) It’s immensely powerful and flexible, and has a much nicer graphical interface than finder. I basically use it as my user interface to the computer.

Thanks for the introduction. One thing I can not figure out is how to filter on a particular item of metadata (say ISO speed). It is not in the filters panel. If I right click on Filter I get a list of metadata categories and ISO speed is checked but checking/unchecking does not seem to do anything. I can use the criteria in a smart collection but that compares text instead of numbers so ? 2500 yields 640 as matching. Is there any way to filter like you do in LR by just selecting the field?

Sorry Anthony, you seem to have glossed over a few things. You mention collections as “like Lightroom”. How does Bridge create collections without a catalog to store them? Also, you did an edit using camera raw. Is this non-destructive like LR? Do the edits to into a sidecar file or are they applied to the file?

I’m using Bridge to navigate my folders. Not using Photoshop. However, I’m frustrating by how Bridge manages Favorites and Collections. When the folder is not available (because it’s a external SSD, or has been renamed for example), Bridge alerts you this folder is not reachable, and deletes it. When you have a lot of rules, seeing Bridge deletes your collection because it can’t find the target folder, is frutstrating. Bahaviour you don’t have in Lightroom Catalog.

I just went Lr+Ps after decades of Bridge+ACR+Ps. All because a faulty import function in Bridge I could not fix AND the added value of the Loupedeck+ within Lr. I think Lr is more complete and the selecting process and global editing is much faster with the Loupedeck. I never do any local editing in Lr (or ACR). Ps is much more versatile for that and much more precise. But having to use Camera Raw as a filter in Ps is still odd when working from Lr. Setting up the Loupedeck+ for use with Bridge and ACR is just too much hassle. The only reason I used to hate Lr was the inability to access my library physically, as files and folders on a disk. But somehow along the way they fixed that.