Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

Chapter 22. Using Adobe Bridge

As digital images pile up on your hard drive, the ability to sift through them 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 files on your machine, regardless of whether you used Bridge to import ’em. Think of it as an alternative to the Mac’s Finder or Windows Explorer.

Bridge can display thumbnail previews of multiple file formats—more than either OS X or Windows 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 can it preview QuarkXPress files (a popular page-layout program).

Because everything you do to files in Bridge happens to those files on your hard drive, Bridge is typically the easiest place to perform mundane file-management tasks such as renaming, moving, copying, and deleting files. It also gives you easy access ...