Chapter six. Working with Adobe Bridge

ADOBE BRIDGE IS A SOMETIMES UNDER-APPRECIATED assistant in the quest for more efficiency. When Bridge first appeared in Adobe Creative Suite CS2, some people took one look at it, decided it was yet another image browser, and never opened it again. And that's too bad, because Bridge is actually a powerful tool for managing massive numbers of files at once.

One way to understand Bridge is to realize the difference between working with one document and working with many documents. Many people are used to working with Photoshop like this: Find an image, open an image, work on it, save and close it. Things change when you work on large, image-intensive projects such as magazines and catalogs, where you can save a lot of time if you have the ability to locate a specific image quickly, or apply the same change to any number of images.

You may think that those concerns don't apply to you if you aren't a production artist. Ah, but what about that cool new digital camera you just bought? With a digital camera, it's easy to shoot hundreds of images before you realize you've done it. You can accumulate images far faster than was practical with a film camera, and as your collection grows, you begin to face the challenges of processing large numbers of photos and finding a specific photoexactly the problems Adobe Bridge is designed to help you solve.