I’ve played around with Adobe Bridge several times over the years, but have never fully embraced using it for my day to day workflow. Since I was reorganizing my hard drives and photo library, I decided to give it another try.
A bit of explaining before I get too far ahead of myself. I’ve been executing my image reorganization project for the past couple of weeks. The basic idea was to eliminate duplications, clean out undesired files, and collect all of my photographs into directories by the year the photograph was made. I finished this organization with individual file directories on 3 different 3.5inch SATA drives located in my external disk array. The yearly directories from 2003 (when I switched to digital) through 2025 (year to date.) I then created Adobe Lightroom catalogs for each year, plus a couple of other catalogs for ongoing projects such as my stock photography, ghost towns and such, which did consist of duplicated images, but not that many in the grand scheme of what I’m doing with file storage. My total available hard drive space attached to the computer is 2 ea, 8 Tb drives and 1 ea, 4 Tb drive for a total of 20 terabytes of available storage for all of my digital photographs. All my other system files are located on a 2 TB SSD, which is also my boot drive. My total drive space for photographs is around 9.5 Terabytes, so I’m roughly half full on my hard drives at this time. All total, I have over 400,000 photographs on my system after removing duplicates. I also have a lot of video files, music files and other personal files on my computer. Everything is now organized, and the system runs very fast.
During this process, I deleted my master Lightroom catalog which previously indexed all of my images. It was a very large catalog too. But, Lightroom handled it all and it didn’t seem to reduce the performance. I could call up anything without a lot of delay. The only thing I lost were the virtual collections and smart collections I had created over the years, but the files were still intact. So, I decided to see what I could do with Adobe Bridge to replicate my collections from scratch using Bridge collections and smart collections.
On the surface, Adobe Bridge and Adobe Lightroom share some common features. Both allow for a collective viewpoint for image thumbnails, the ability to organize collections, edit exif information, and serve as an interface to photo editing software, most notably Adobe Photoshop.
Here’s where I found the drawback to using Adobe Bridge for managing all of my photographs.
Firstly, after I added the yearly directories to bridge as favorites and then visited any of those folders, Bridge would immediately begin indexing the image files in that folder. That indexing took a long time to create the thumbnails and previews. A very long time. Sometimes it would take hours. Sometimes Bridge would stop indexing and report as “not responding.” Meaning everything I was doing at that moment had to be stopped, Bridge had to be closed and I would have to repeat that action. Exasperating. Slow too. I managed to index about 4 directories and decided that Bridge was going to be problematic for organizing and managing my photos. It took far too long.
I also began the process of creating specific collections based on subject matter. For example, I created collections of Sandhill Crane photos, but it became a major pain trying to comb through each year and flagging my sandhill crane photographs for the collection. Bridge kept freezing. I did some research and found a few possible solutions to the freezing problem, and the most effective thing was to increase the size of the Adobe Bridge cache file. I went from the default of 50 gigabytes to 350 gigabytes. but the slowness of indexing those files still brought the process to a crawl. Bridge would reindex files when I opened a collection. To make matters worse, Bridge did not remember where I left off, so I had to go back through a directory and scroll down to the the images that were last selected. Adobe Lightroom catalogs remember where you were when you last used a directory. Bridge resulted in a lot of effort just to find a file buried in the directory.
The bottom line is that I found Adobe Bridge interface to be too primitive and far too slow to be very useful for file organization on a large scale. Adobe Lightroom does everything Bridge will do, plus a lot more and it does it faster.
I ended up abandoning Adobe Bridge and simply switching back to Adobe Lightroom to get the job done. I don’t know what Adobe has in mind for future versions of Adobe Bridge, but it feels as though they’ve left this software behind and moved on to Lightroom. Why they still keep Bridge in their Creative Cloud lineup is a mystery. It needs some serious modernization to make it a truly effective file management option.
