Written By Steve Patterson

Thanks to digital cameras and the ever-expanding storage capacity of memory cards, photographers everywhere now have the freedom and flexibility to snap as many photos as we like of family, friends, special occasions, or whatever happens to catch our eye or capture our interest and imagination. Often, we end up taking far more photos than we'll ever need because it's just so darn easy to keep pressing the shutter button until the memory card is full. And even then, if you have an extra card or two (or ten) in your pocket, it takes all of a few seconds to swap out the old card, pop in a new one and you're off to the races once again. It never fails to amaze me how quickly I can fill up a memory card with hundreds of images without realizing it, which is why I never leave home without first making sure I have extra memory cards tucked safely into my camera bag. Now, if I can just remember to bring the camera bag with me, but then life would be just a little too easy.

The problem, though, with all this newly acquired photographic freedom is that it can quickly lead to chaos, confusion and frustration if we don't realize that what we do with our photos at the end of the day is every bit as important as the images themselves. If all you have is a hand full, or even a few dozen photos, organizing them is no big deal. But if you have hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of photos stored on your computer, keeping track of them can become a nightmare, and there's not much point in taking photos if you can never find them when you need them.

Fortunately, Adobe has created a great program to help us organize and manage our images called Adobe Bridge, or simply Bridge. Bridge is a standalone application, but it's included free with Photoshop, whether you purchased Photoshop on its own or as part of a Creative Suite package. It first appeared with Photoshop CS2 as a replacement for the old File Browser from previous versions of Photoshop, and it's gotten better and better with each new release. In this series of tutorials, we're going to look specifically at Bridge CS4 which ships with Photoshop CS4. We'll start with a quick, general tour of the program to see what's what and where it all is, then we'll look at how to use Bridge CS4 to download our photos from the camera or memory card to the computer. Once we have the images safely downloaded, we'll see how easy it is to preview, review, rate, label, move, copy, reject and delete, rename, rotate and filter images, how to save them as collections, how to add metadata and keywords, and more, all from directly within Bridge!

Let's get started!

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Launching Bridge

There's a few different ways to launch Bridge. If you already have Photoshop CS4 open, you can go up to the File menu at the top of the screen in Photoshop and choose the Browse in Bridge command, or you can press the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Alt+O (Win) / Command+Option+O (Mac) (that's a letter O, not a zero). The fastest and most common way, though, to open Bridge is by clicking on the Launch Bridge icon in the Application Bar. If you're on a Mac as I am here, the Application Bar is located directly below the Menu Bar along the top of the screen. On a PC, the Application Bar is located to the right of the Menu Bar:

Whichever way you choose, the Bridge interface will appear on your screen, with three main columns of panels dividing up the interface vertically and a series of icons and options along the top, as well as a few more in the bottom right corner. By default, the column in the middle is where we find the Content panel which displays thumbnail versions of the images inside the currently selected folder:

Bridge isn't that difficult to learn, but there's a lot to cover to get the most out of the program. Before we go digging into specifics, let's take a quick tour of all the different panels and options we're seeing on the screen, starting with the icons in the top left corner.

The Browse Buttons

In the top left corner of the Bridge CS4 interface are the Browse buttons (the left and right-pointing arrows) which act just like the Browse buttons in your favorite web browser. As you navigate through different folders on your computer using Bridge, you can click on the Back and Forward icons to move back and forth through your browsing history:

Parent Or Favorites

To the right of the Browse buttons is a small, down-pointing arrow. Clicking on it opens a menu that let's you quickly select any of the parent folders of the folder you're currently in, or you can jump to any of the folders or directories that appear in your Favorites panel, which is a topic we'll save for later:

Recent Files Or Folders

Next to the down-pointing arrow is the Recent Files or Folders icon. Click on it to reveal a list of the files you've recently viewed and the folders you've visited. Bridge works with all of the programs in the Creative Suite, not just Photoshop, so if you've opened any files for Illustrator, InDesign, Flash, etc., they'll appear here, too. To clear the list, click on the Clear Recent Files and Clear Recent Folders options at the bottom of the menu:

The Path Bar

All of the icons we've looked at so far have had something to do with navigating through our files and folders, and directly below these icons is one of my favorite navigation options in Bridge CS4, the Path Bar. The Path Bar shows us the full file path to the folder we're currently looking at. For example, I'm currently viewing a bunch of random images I've collected inside a folder appropriately named "Random", which is inside the larger "My Photos" folder, which is inside the "My Files" directory, and so on. We can see this entire file path in the Path Bar. But what makes the Path Bar so useful is that if you click on any of the directories listed in the Path Bar, you'll jump instantly to that folder:

Get Photos From Camera

As we continue with the icons along the top left of the Bridge CS4 interface, we arrive at a small camera icon with a down-pointing arrow. This is the Get Photos From Camera option, which we'll look at in the very next tutorial. Clicking on this icon opens the Photo Downloader, which is where we can select the device we want to download our photos from and set various options for where we want to save the images, file naming conventions, and so on. Again, we'll cover these details in the next tutorial:

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