Adobe Bridge

Bridge is an entirely different category of program than Illustrator, InDesign or Photoshop. Bridge is not made to produce images at all: it is simply a very high-end program for organizing image files and documents. As you’ve seen throughout the semester, working in Photoshop or Illustrator generally involves producing a lot of files, often of many different types: PSD, JPG, TIFF scans, .AI files, PDFs, etc. Bridge is designed to help you keep these files organized and labeled. Not to be corny, but it literally does provide a ‘bridge’ between the various Adobe CS programs. Knowing a few basic things about Bridge might be helpful as you’re working on organizing your semesters’ worth of work. Let’s take a look at the program.

File Organization

When you open up Bridge, it looks like a complex version of the standard Finder window you’re familiar with in Mac OSX. On the upper left, you see a list of locations on your computer’s hard drive, including your user home folder and the desktop, as well as icons for any external drives you may have connected to your computer.

1) Start by clicking on your thumb drive. This will bring up the folders on your drive in the main Bridge window. Navigate until you have reached a folder that contains multiple images.

2) Once you are at this point, you can go to File: New Folder and create a new folder. Just like in Mac OSX, you can rename the folder, and drag items into it manually. For example, you might want to have one folder for your Bending History assignment, and then individual subfolders named PSD, JPG, TIFF, etc. based in the different file types.

3) You can also go to File: New Window and drag items from one folder to another across the windows. So far, you could accomplish all of this with Mac OS, but let’s take a look at some of the other functions Bridge offers.

File Labeling

One of the best features of Bridge is its capacity to sort and label files. For example, if you’ve just shot a batch of digital photos, and you now need to import them and select the images to use, Bridge can make this process very easy.

Let’s say you need to capture images from a camera. Rather than using the Mac Image Capture software, you can do this directly in Bridge. Go to File: Get Pictures from Camera. This brings up a dialogue that allows you to choose the location and filenames of the images as they’re captured.

Once you have a set of images open in Bridge, go to the Label menu. This allows you to label some images as rejects, and assign star ratings to others. You can then use this information to sort the images later, saving time over manually sorting through the images again and again.

Metadata

One final note: Bridge has many, many functions, but the one I’d like to leave you with is creating and assigning metadata. Metadata literally means ‘data about data.’ In practice, metadata is a packet of information that you can assign to an image file to indicate its ownership and copyright status.

When you begin posting images of your own creative work online, it is vital that you assign a set of metadata to them. This indicates that you created the work, and either retain or surrender the rights to it. No matter how many generations a file goes through, it retains the metadata (for example if a file is saved as a PSD with metadata, and you then save a JPG of it, the JPG has the same set of metadata). For files with copyright information, Photoshop shows the circle-C copyright image next to the filename at the top of the image window.

The first thing you’ll need to do is create a metadata template. Go to Tools: New Metadata Template, and fill in the information you’d like to include. I generally include only my name, email, website and phone number, and type ‘all rights reserved’ in the Copyright Notice box. This is enough to indicate I created and own the file.

Once you have a metadata template, you can select any number of images in the Bridge browser, and then go to Tools: Append Metadata. The name of your template should appear in a pop-up menu. Select your template. Bridge will ask whether you want to append the metadata of all the files: hit Yes, and then Bridge will write your metadata to all of the files. I make this step part of my usual workflow in working with images: as soon as I have a new batch of images, I open them in Bridge, write my standard metadata to them, and proceed with editing the images.

While this may seem esoteric at the moment, if you do continue working with digital images, it will become very useful. I didn’t get this information until much later in my experience with digital imaging, and wish I’d had it sooner.