From the course: Photoshop for Designers: Working with Bridge

What is Bridge used for?

From the course: Photoshop for Designers: Working with Bridge

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What is Bridge used for?

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- [Instructor] Adobe Bridge is an extremely versatile, and I think much underused application that is many things to many people. First and foremost, it is a visual file browser. It allows you to manage your files in ways that are similar to working in the Finder or Windows Explorer, but it is much more graphical, and therefore it makes it much easier to work with your assets. For example, if I come here to my Favorites panel, I'll right click on my Exercise Files folder, and I can choose to Reveal this in the Finder. Now in the Finder, if I open that folder, and then we'll open this folder, I might be looking at small thumbnails like this or I might be seeing my files as a list of just file names. That doesn't tell me much, but here in Bridge if I view that same content, I can increase or decrease the size of my thumbnails. I can click on the image and I can see metadata about the image. And if I want to work on one of these images, I can just double click on it and that will take me into Photoshop. Once in Photoshop if I want to toggle back to Bridge, from the File menu I can choose Browse in Bridge. And in Bridge I can toggle back to Photoshop by clicking on the Boomerang icon at the top left. There are already quite a few courses in the Training Library about Bridge. Check out those by Rich Harrington, Julieanne Kost, and Tim Gray, and they cover in some detail the basics of working with Bridge. So for that reason I don't want to duplicate their content, I'm going to be very brief in my overview of working with the Bridge interface, and then I'm going to concentrate on these tools that we can access from within Bridge and how we can creatively integrate these tools into our workflow. But before we move on to a discussion of the basics of working in Bridge and the Bridge interface, I just want to clear up one popular misconception about Bridge and that is sometimes people will say to me, "How do I put my files into Bridge?" Well, the answer is you don't. Bridge is just a window onto the content that is already on your hard drive. And any changes that you make to that content will be reflected at the Finder level or the Windows Explorer level.

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