Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual

Chapter 23. Using Adobe Bridge

As digital images pile up on your hard drive, the ability to sift through ’em quickly and efficiently becomes more and more important. Enter Adobe Bridge, an image-browsing and -organizing program that’s been shipping with Photoshop for years. Its special purpose in life is to let you browse, compare, sort, manage, import, and even manipulate (to an extent) the files on your hard drive. The important thing to remember about Bridge is that you can use it to see preview thumbnails of most any file on your machine, whether you used Bridge to import ’em or not.

And just like nice clothing stores display goodies from multiple designers, Bridge can display thumbnail previews of multiple file formats—more than either the Mac or Windows operating systems currently can. For example, you can see multiple pages of PDFs and at least two pages of Adobe InDesign files (you can see more than two by tweaking InDesign’s preferences, but that’s fodder for another book). Bridge also lets you watch movie files and listen to audio files, all without opening the files themselves. However, Bridge can’t peek into your iPhoto library because Macs squirrel that away for safekeeping, nor will you see thumbnail previews of QuarkXPress files (a popular page-layout program) even though the document preview is embedded in the XPress file (Adobe programs just don’t take advantage of it).

Because everything you do to files in Bridge happens to those files on your hard drive (in the ...