Written By Steve Patterson

Photoshop CS2 introduced the world to Adobe Bridge, a separate companion program to Photoshop that replaced the old File Browser from previous versions and gave us an easy way to locate, manage and organize our ever-growing collection of photos. With Photoshop CS3 and CS4, Adobe continued to improve Bridge with new features and functionality, yet through it all, one obvious problem remained. Since Bridge was a separate, stand-alone program, any time we needed to locate and open a new image, we had to switch out of Photoshop, over to Bridge, then back to Photoshop again once we found the one we were looking for. It certainly wasn't the most efficient way to work, and for projects like photo collages or other designs that required multiple images, all that switching back and forth between the two programs could easily derail your train of thought and break the creative flow.

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With the release of Photoshop CS5, Bridge is still a separate program, but Adobe has introduced a brand new feature known as Mini Bridge, a new panel in Photoshop that acts sort of like a window between Photoshop and Bridge, allowing us to view and access our images in Bridge without needing to switch to it! With Mini Bridge, we can navigate to the folder that contains the image(s) we need, preview all the images in the folder, and open the ones we want without ever leaving Photoshop! Of course, the word "Mini" in its name is a clue that Mini Bridge was not meant as a replacement for the full version of Bridge. There's many advanced features in Adobe Bridge CS5, like rating and labeling photos and adding them to collections, that are not available to us in Mini Bridge. But for simply locating, previewing and opening images, the new Mini Bridge really shines.

Opening Mini Bridge

Since the whole purpose of Mini Bridge is to make finding and opening images fast and convenient, Adobe wanted to make sure that accessing Mini Bridge itself was also as convenient as possible, so they've added several different ways to get to it. If you have some time to kill, you can go up to the File menu at the top of the screen and choose the new Browse in Mini Bridge command:

Or, you can go up to the Window menu, choose Extensions, and then choose Mini Bridge:

If you'd rather not take the scenic route, a faster way to open Mini Bridge is by clicking on the new Mini Bridge icon in the Application Bar at the top of the screen. You'll find it sitting beside the main Adobe Bridge icon:

Or, if the Mini Bridge panel is collapsed on your screen, simply click on its panel icon to open it:

The Mini Bridge Home Page

Whichever way you choose to access it, Mini Bridge will open in the panel column along the right side of the screen:

When you first open Mini Bridge, it displays the Home Page with a short welcome message, a Browse Files option and a Settings option. You won't spend much time on this screen, but you can return to it at any time if you need to by clicking on the Home Page icon (the small house) in the row of icons along the top:

Browsing Files

To browse through the files and folders on your computer, click on the Browse Files button. For Mini Bridge to work, we need to have the full Adobe Bridge CS5 program open and running in the background, but by default, Mini Bridge will open it automatically for us when we click the Browse Files button if it's not open already:

Once we've selected Browse Files, the layout of the Mini Bridge panel changes, with the top half becoming the main folder navigation area and the bottom half becoming the area where we view and select the contents of the folder we've navigated to. Adobe refers to these areas as "pods", with the one on top being the Navigation Pod and the bottom one being the Content Pod:

The Navigation Pod takes up most of the space in the top half of Mini Bridge and is divided into two columns. The left column contains four main navigation headings - Favorites, which I currently have selected, as well as Recent Folders, Recent Files, and any Collections we've created in the full version of Bridge. As I mentioned earlier, we can't actually create Collections in Mini Bridge, but we can view any that we've already created. Clicking on any of these four main headings displays a related sub menu of choices in the right column. For example, with Favorites selected on the left, the right column is displaying the items that Adobe has gone ahead and selected for me as Favorites, like my Desktop, as well as my main Documents and Pictures folders:

The Navigation Pod is limited to only two columns, so clicking on an item in the right column will display its contents in the Content Pod in the bottom half of the Mini Bridge panel. With my Pictures folder selected, we see that the Content Pod is displaying the sub folders that are inside my Pictures folder. To open folders in the Content Pod and view their contents, simply double-click on them. I'll double-click on the Places folder to open it:

Inside my Places folder is another folder named Beach. I'll double-click on it to open it:

Finally, inside my Beach folder are my images, which appear in the Content Pod as small thumbnails with the file names listed below them, just like they'd appear in the full version of Bridge. Double-click on a thumbnail to open the image in Photoshop, or if the image is in the raw format, it will open inside the Camera Raw dialog box:

By default, the Content Pod is a little too small to be of much use, so let's look at some ways to customize Mini Bridge. We'll do that next!

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