The Photoshop CS4 Companion for Photographers

Introduction to Keywording

I'm sure you've been told at least once that you should add keywords to your images. But why? The bottom line is that it will help you find them later on. And I'm going to show you how.

I'll start by highlighting the excellent tools Bridge has for retrieving and sorting your images using keywords. My hope is that you'll be so enthused about this power that you'll happily spend a minute or two adding keywords to your pictures after you've finished rating them. Let's see how motivating I can be.

Tools for Searching by Keywords

Bridge provides two handy tools to help you find images via keywords. The first is the Search window in the upper-left corner of the interface, and the second is Smart Collections.

Using Search couldn't be easier. Click once on your Bridge Masters folder in the Favorites panel to highlight it. Now enter your search term in the Search field in the upper-right corner of the Bridge interface and press the Return key. If there are results, Bridge will display them in the Content pane.

Figure 3-17. Note the search word in the upper-right corner and the results display in the Content pane.

By clicking the magnifying glass icon in the Search field, you can select different ways to perform your hunt. Generally speaking, the Search feature in Bridge will get the job done nicely.

Another approach is to use the Find dialog box. In the Edit pop-up menu, ...