Make the Work Flow

Bridge is a deep, complex, and very powerful tool that puts you in charge of an even deeper, more complex, and more powerful workflow system. Bridge lets you do many things once, and once only, so that you don't need to keep doing them over and over again, whether it's applying Camera Raw settings, entering copyright notices, or rotating and cropping images. The time you spend in Bridge will be amply repaid further down the line.

You can make the work flow even faster if you plan it. Bridge lets you carry out operations in any order you choose; but the most efficient way is to proceed from the general to the specific, starting with the operations that every image needs (such as a copyright notice) and continuing with the more individualized and specific needs of progressively smaller numbers of images.

Some things, such as entering descriptions or captions, you'll have to do image by image, and you'll almost certainly want to fine-tune the Camera Raw settings for your hero images on an individual basis. But you probably don't need to hand-tune every single image that you shoot. Instead, use Bridge to whittle down the large collection of raws to the images that truly deserve individual attention, and save the handwork for those.